studies in modernity and national identity

Sibel Bozdovan and Reşat Kasaba, Series Editors

Studies in Modernity and National Identity examine the relationships among
modernity, the nation-state, and nationalism as these have evolved in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. Titles in this interdisciplinary and transregional series also
illuminate how the nation-state is being undermined by the forces of globalization,
international migration, and electronic information flows, as well as resurgent eth-
nic and religious a‹liations. These books highlight historical parallels and continu-
ities while documenting the social, cultural, and spatial expressions through which
modern national identities have been constructed, contested, and reinvented.

Modernism and Nation Building: Turkish Architectural Culture in the Early Republic
by Sibel Bozdovan
Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier: The Struggle for Modernity in Postcolonial India
by Vikramaditya Prakash
Islamist Mobilization in Turkey: A Study in Vernacular Politics by Jenny B. White
The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space, edited by Evgeny
Dobrenko and Eric Naiman
Architecture and Tourism in Italian Colonial Libya: An Ambivalent Modernism by
Brian L. McLaren
Everyday Modernity in China, edited by Madeleine Yue Dong and Joshua L.
Goldstein
Nationalizing Iran: Culture, Power, and the State, 1870–1940 by Afshin Marashi
Empire, Architecture, and the City: French-Ottoman Encounters (1830–1914), by
Zeynep Çelik
Modernism and the Middle East: Architecture and Politics in the Twentieth Century,
edited by Sandy Isenstadt and Kishwar Rizvi
MODERNISM
AND THE
MIDDLE EAST
Architecture and Politics in the Twentieth Century

edited by sandy isenstadt and kishwar rizvi

university of washington press | seattle and london

Publication of Modernism and the Middle East was supported
by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced
Studies in the Fine Arts. Additional assistance came from
the Frederick W. Hilles Publication Fund and the Edward J.
and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund, both of Yale
University.

© 2008 by the University of Washington Press

Printed in the United States of America
12 11 10 09 08 5 4 3 2 1

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording,
or any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher.

University of Washington Press

P.O. Box 50096, Seattle, WA 98145 U.S.A.
www.washington.edu/uwpress

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Modernism and the Middle East : architecture and politics

in the twentieth century / edited by Sandy Isenstadt and
Kishwar Rizvi. — 1st ed.
p. cm. — (Studies in modernity and national identity)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-295-98821-4 (hardback : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-295-98794-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Architecture and society—Middle East—History—
20th century. 2. Modernism (Aesthetics)—Middle East—
History—20th century. I. Isenstadt, Sandy, 1957–
II. Rizvi, Kishwar.
na2543.s6m58 2008
720.1'0309560904—dc22 2007051765

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum

requirements of American National Standard for Informa-
tion Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ansi z39.48–1984.
Contents

Preface vii

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Modern Architecture and the Middle East:

The Burden of Representation 3
sandy isenstadt and kishwar rizvi

part i Colonial Constructions

1 Jerusalem Remade 39
annabel wharton

2 Modern Architecture, Preservation, and the Discourse on Local

Culture in Italian Colonial Libya 61
brian l. m c laren
 part ii Building the Nation

3 Visions of Iraq: Modernizing the Past in 1950s Baghdad 81

magnus t. bernhardsson

4 Baghdad’s Urban Restructuring, 1958: Aesthetics and the Politics

of Nation Building 97
panayiota i. pyla

5 Democracy, Development, and the Americanization of Turkish

Architectural Culture in the 1950s 116
sibel bozdoğan

6 Temporal States of Architecture: Mass Immigration and

Provisional Housing in Israel 139
roy kozlovsky

7 Modernisms in Conflict: Architecture and Cultural Politics

in Post-1967 Jerusalem 161
alona nitzan-shiftan

8 Palestinian Remembrance Days and Plans: Kafr Qasim,

Fact and Echo 186
waleed khleif and susan slyomovics

part iii Overviews and Openings

9 Global Ambition and Local Knowledge 221

gwendolyn wright

10 From Modernism to Globalization: The Middle East in Context 255

nezar alsayyad

Bibliography 267

Contributors 289

Index 293
Preface

T his book emerged from the symposium “Local Sites of Global Prac-
tice: Modernism and the Middle East,” held at Yale University’s
School of Architecture, April 4–5, 2003.1 The symposium was orga-
nized to address a pressing issue in architecture today: the emerging friction
between increasingly globalized economic and cultural relationships and an
increasingly heightened sense of local identity. As symbols of indigenous char-
acter and political sovereignty continue to stream through the global media,
architecture has become a powerful icon for the performance of local,
regional, and national identities. Many architects find themselves choosing
one side or the other, either promoting regional specificity or professing the
international validity of modernism. Even as they strive to synthesize local
building traditions with modern construction technologies, practitioners
may inadvertently reinforce stereotypes or serve only the interests of a nar-
row stratum of the local population. Around the world, architects are absorb-
ing and responding to local concerns with construction methods and materials
that are by now familiar in any major city on earth.
The symposium brought together architects and scholars from a range
of backgrounds to present papers and debate issues that proved to be more
conflictive than the planners originally imagined: American-led troops had
marched into Iraq just two weeks before, and the symposium opened to the
news that American tanks were rolling into Baghdad. Many participants were
impassioned and eloquent as they spoke about these events, unfolding at a

vii
distance but very close to their scholarly interests. At the same time, a num-
ber of participants expressed their sense of frustration and the fear that any
debates about Iraq, at the very moment that the country was erupting into
flames, threatened to make their concerns irrelevant. But the looting of the
National Museum of Iraq one week later reinvigorated some participants’
convictions that cultural understandings and misunderstandings had contrib-
uted to processes that had led to military action. With these essays, we illus-
trate how the long history of the built environment in the modern Middle
East can both reinforce and subvert more explicit—and more catastrophic—
governmental and institutional policies.

note

1. The “Local Sites of Global Practice” symposium was sponsored by Yale Uni-
versity’s School of Architecture and the Department of the History of Art, and
was co-chaired by Sandy Isenstadt and Kishwar Rizvi, the editors of this volume,
along with Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen of the School of Architecture.

viii Preface
Acknowledgments

W e are indebted to Yale University’s School of Architecture,

under the leadership of Dean Robert A. M. Stern, for the spon-
sorship of “Local Sites of Global Practice: Modernism and the
Middle East,” the symposium in which many of these essays were first pre-
sented. We are grateful as well for financial support from the Edward J. and
Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund at the Yale Center for International
and Area Studies (ycias); and the David W. Roth and Robert H. Symonds
Memorial Lecture Fund, and the Department of the History of Art, Yale Uni-
versity. In this regard, we thank Robert Stern; Abbas Amanat, former chair
of the Council on Middle East Studies; Gustav Ronis, former director of the
ycias; and Edward Cooke Jr., former chair of the Department of the History
of Art. Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, our friend and colleague, was likewise instru-
mental in guaranteeing the success of the symposium.
Additionally, we would like to acknowledge those colleagues who contrib-
uted to the symposium but chose not to have their papers included in this
volume: Gulsum Baydar, Layla Diba, Ijlal Muzaªar, Hashim Sarkis, and Hasan
Uddin Khan. We greatly appreciate the participation and insights of our col-
leagues Keller Easterling and Alan Plattus, and of our keynote speaker, Arjun
Appadurai. We are also grateful to Richard Kane, John Jacobson, and Jennifer
Castellon for their “ local” support.
Many of these same individuals and organizations were unstinting in their
generosity as we worked to transform the symposium papers into this vol-

ix
ume of essays. Barbara Shailor, Robert Stern, and Ian Shapiro, director of the
MacMillan Center (formerly the ycias), drawing again on its Edward J. and
Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund, marshaled considerable resources
on behalf of this project, and we thank them. We are honored to have received
support from Yale University’s Hilles Publication Fund and from the Graham
Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
The primary motivation for compiling this book was the students in our
classes on “Global Modernism” and “Modernism in the Middle East,” whose
curiosity and interest encouraged us to undertake the project. Additionally,
we are grateful for the provocative comments of colleagues and students at
Columbia University in New York and Zayed University in Dubai, where mate-
rial from the introductory essay was presented. In particular, we thank
Nasser Rabbat for his perceptive comments on the essay. For the assistance
they lent to this volume, we also thank Zachary Heineman and Brad Wal-
ters. Finally, we would like to thank Michael Duckworth, Sibel Bozdovan,
Reşat Kasaba, and Beth Fuget, in their various roles at the University of Wash-
ington Press, for their tireless eªorts to develop and advance Modernism and
the Middle East.

x Acknowledgments
Modernism and the Middle East
fig. I.1. Map of the Middle East
Introduction
Modern Architecture and the Middle East: The Burden
of Representation

sandy isenstadt and kishwar rizvi

T he essays in this volume investigate the contribution that local

Middle Eastern contexts make to discourses in international mod-
ernism. The essayists define modernization not only as the exten-
sion of industrialized building processes and urban infrastructure, but also
as the spread of ideals of progress and standards of comfort—which is to say,
modernization is the ideology as well as the built framework for the admin-
istration of industrial societies. Architecture can help consolidate identity by
providing both a degree of social cohesion and iconic forms that can become
a source of pride for communities. Yet, for others, such architectural forms
can become stereotypes that flatten culture into a mere sign. Throughout these
essays, one discerns an abiding concern for questions of representation,
for how buildings and monuments— or in some cases, the lack of them—
acquire meaning, harden conviction, and set the spatial infrastructure for sub-
sequent generations.
The Middle East, with its diverse social, religious, and national histories,
has often been seen by architects and academics as rich in traditional archi-
tecture but poor as a resource for understanding the Modern period. Euro-
peans have idealized the Middle East as an almost timeless place, a region
that stands in distinct and didactic contrast with the disruptive displacement
and disillusionment that has resulted from its own industrialization.1 These
essays describe the unique ways by which Middle Eastern countries have
invented their own versions of modernism, sometimes aligned and sometimes

3
at odds with more familiar European versions, and in varying relations with
larger patterns of imperialism and colonialism. When individual designers
and decision makers crossed national borders to build or to learn, to provide
aid or extract resources, as architects, teachers, or tourists, the dichotomies
of modern-traditional or Western-Eastern did not truly hold.
Our goal here is to build into the study of transnational architectural
exchange the widest consideration of constituencies and the most extended
opportunities for input. Contributors examine a wide range of cultural encoun-
ters in terms of institutionalization of relationships, dynamic interactions of
bureaucratic structures, and patterns of patronage amid debates over design
and urban planning. Even local histories are multiple, often disputed in their
formation, and inevitably shifting over time. Taken together, they illustrate
the various strategies that set national policies and decide who is housed and
who goes wanting, who is remembered and who is forgotten, and who is
empowered to remake the built landscape.
Several essays profile the individuals who helped realize certain specifi-
cally Middle Eastern forms of modernity. Some of them, such as European
art historians and expatriate architects and archeologists, positioned them-
selves as the arbiters of Western knowledge, while others were seen as
importing Western ideals and technologies to the Middle East. In other cases,
institutions, such as governments or development agencies, assumed these
roles. In many instances, however, cultural authority was as much a mat-
ter of dynamic transitions in political or architectural sympathies as it was
the result of o‹cial credentials. These essays call attention to circuits of
intention and response, which inflamed allegedly objective depictions of
technological progress into heated debates regarding the nature of moder-
nity itself.
Modernism and the Middle East contextualizes the challenges facing build-
ing eªorts today by placing them within a larger historical trajectory stretch-
ing from colonialism and the rise of nation-states to the present postcolonial
search for local identity. By detailing how architecture has been integral to com-
plex political ambitions and economic programs, the contributors make evi-
dent the historical roles played by competing visions of the built environment,
as forms of representation and as a means of directing capital and labor flows.
With such attention to its deep traditions and rapid modernization, the Mid-
dle East emerges as a rich setting for the study of modern architecture.
Modernism and the Middle East begins at the cusp of the twentieth century
amid the decline of colonialism and the rise of independent nation-states in
regions once ruled by the Ottomans (r. 1290–1924) in present-day Turkey and

4 Introduction
North Africa, and the Qajars (r. 1779–1924) in Iran (see fig. I.1).2 Under the
dynastic leadership of the Sultan, overseer of the holy sites of Mecca and Med-
ina and the supreme ruler of the Sunni Islamic world, the relatively stable
and unified Ottoman Empire had administered much of today’s Middle East.
But this administrative unity and geographic cohesion was eroded greatly
during the nineteenth century, and it dissolved completely in the twentieth.3
Beyond the actual loss of land, Ottoman rule was disrupted by major infra-
structure developments, most notably the Suez Canal (1854–69), which
brought French and, later, English capital and technology to Egypt.4
By the twilight of World War I, in 1918, Istanbul had itself come under
Allied control, and the six-hundred-year-old Ottoman Empire came to an end,
its former lands divided into areas administered by the French (Syria and
Lebanon) and the British (Iraq and Palestine).5 Even as new nations emerged
with at least nominal sovereignty from the Mandate period, the idea of a
coherent, if not exactly cohesive, Middle East was reinforced. The Mandates
carved new political entities, such as Palestine and Iraq, out of former Otto-
man administrative zones, but it kept these nations from being fully indepen-
dent, and left them wanting in terms of industrial development. At the same
time, European occupation sparked nationalist movements in neighboring
Turkey and Iran, resulting in the overthrow of puppet monarchies and the
rise of charismatic military leaders, who threw oª centuries of imperial rule
and modernized in the name of national progress. The advent of Mustafa
Kemal in Turkey (1919) and Riza Khan in Iran (1921) brought new modes of
judicial and educational reforms (often based on European models), in an
eªort to forge homogeneous, if fictive, native identities.6 The characteriza-
tion of entire peoples by their positions along the trajectory of history and
modernization was as much embraced by regional leaders as it was imposed
by European power and ideology.
Oil came to be written into this idea of a cohesive Middle East as much
by its discovery there as by the increasing industrial thirst for sources of fuel.
The image of Arab states unified by oceans of oil lying unseen beneath their
soil emerged in the nineteenth century with the advent of a British-controlled
Anglo-Persian oil company. It was extended as new fields were discovered,
such as those in Iraq in the 1930s and those in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia by
1945. With the institution of the American’s Marshall Plan (1948–52), the
European economy was reconfigured according to American precepts,
resulting in an emphasis on continued growth in productivity and an even
greater dependence on oil. The Middle East thus moved to the center of
foreign-policy strategies for a number of Western nations, becoming also a

Introduction 5
site of contentious ideological positioning between the Soviet Union and
the United States, with both nations acting out their political diªerences
through technical aid and development projects as well as cultural exports.
Although some small Persian Gulf monarchies enjoyed considerable advan-
tages over their oil-poor neighbors, to Westerners the region maintained its
conceptual integrity as a site of superpower struggle and vast economic
opportunity.7
The creation of the state of Israel, on May 14, 1948, also helped consoli-
date an idea of the Middle East, albeit in a way unanticipated by most West-
ern politicians. Although Jewish immigration to the area in the first half of
the twentieth century had profoundly aªected the economic and demographic
character of Mandate Palestine, the United Nations’ 1947 plan to partition
the area into Jewish and Arab states, which was rejected by the Arab League,
formed in 1945, seemed only to reassert Western colonialism at the very
moment it was breaking apart elsewhere.
Within this context, the Middle East must be historically situated as a place
defined both by European colonial interests and by the specific imperial
configurations that had existed in the region. Just as the specter of essential-
ism hovers over the term “Middle East,” one may argue that it also haunts
the idea of a homogeneous “Europe”; nonetheless, as Dipesh Chakrabarty
has argued in another context, these terms highlight, rather than obfuscate,
the problematic of domination and intellectual dependency that permeates
any discussion of these two entities.8 The interdependency of Europe and
the Middle East can be seen in the unfolding of an “Oriental” supplement to
European identity: what was understood by nineteenth-century policy-
makers as the “Eastern question” had to do less with the inhabitants of these
regions than with the raw currency of human labor and material wealth
promised through imperialism.
Along with unabashed military power, European systems of social organ-
ization also marched across the region. By the end of the nineteenth century,
in Istanbul as well as Tehran, there were two primary modes of thinking about
Islamic government. On the one hand, an indigenous intelligentsia, educated
at European institutions, subscribed to the idea of nations organized to uphold
individual rights, and so demanded constitutional government. On the other
hand, reformers, who interpreted Islamic law and rule as being consistent
with individual freedom, called for an Islamic revival from within these very
institutions. These tensions resulted in a series of experiments with European
legal institutions and, in the early twentieth century, fully developed, albeit
short-lived constitutions in Turkey and Iran.

6 Introduction
 In the early years of the twentieth century, intellectuals in both Europe and
the Middle East looked to an idea of the “East” in search of alternative modes
of living, an expression of their dissatisfaction and disillusionment with the
artifacts of modernity. The political fragmentation of great empires, rapid
industrialization, and an expanding urban malaise and the alienation it pro-
duced were all motivating factors for a renewed interest in Eastern art and
religion. This interest was filtered through notions of racial and cultural supe-
riority, however, and the lands of the Middle East became subject to oriental-
ist interpretations, both by natives and by their European counterparts. The
orientalist interpretation was very diªerent from the lived experience of
those in the Middle East: independence movements, increasing autonomy for
the arts, and the growth of a middle class were all phenomena that the resi-
dents of cities as diverse as Cairo, Tehran, and Algiers experienced. This shared
experience of modernity, seldom implemented on the basis of parity, demands
closer scrutiny.

writing a middle east

Several sites in the Middle East were of particular interest to European and
American archeologists, who since the late nineteenth century had focused
almost obsessively on the search for biblical and classical origins of mankind.
When their attention turned toward the Islamic period, it too was centered
on questions of origins. Excavations were begun at Ummayad palaces and
mosques in Syria, and at the Abbasid capitals of Baghdad and Samarra in Iraq,
while monuments built during the six-hundred-year reign of the Ottomans
were ignored.9 From as early as the seventeenth century, documentation and
description by travelers, such as Adam Olearius and Engelbert Kaempfer in
Iran, had made certain cities and monuments familiar to Europeans, although
whole-scale architectural documentation emerged only later through diplo-
matic commissions, such as those undertaken in the nineteenth century by
Charles Texier (1802–1871) and Pascale Coste (1787–1879). Coste’s two sig-
nificant works, Monuments modernes de la Perse, mesurés, dessinés et décrits (1867)
and the monumental Architecture Arabe; ou, Monuments du Kaire: Mesurés et dess-
inés, de 1818 à 1826 (1839), were milestones in the manner in which architec-
ture was disassembled and presented to the viewer in an academic, Beaux-Arts
style. The documentation already undertaken by the French, in the Descrip-
tion de l’Egypt (1828), for example, on the occasion of Napoleon’s conquest
of Egypt, and by the British in India (e.g., Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan
[1829] by General James Tod), would fall into the category of colonial ethnog-

Introduction 7
raphy. By contrast, Coste’s works were valued primarily for the architectural
information they contained, although they too were arguably still within the
colonial frame.10 The travel documentary would be the precursor to the more
academic survey, which would provide an intellectual and art historical inter-
pretation for the works catalogued.
European museums and their local counterparts played a significant role
in constructing a visual and architectural documentary of the Middle East.
Among the earliest museum collections of Near Eastern art were those in
Istanbul, London, Berlin, and Vienna. These museums were advised and sup-
plied by a series of scholars influential in the study of Islamic art. Friedrich
Sarre (1865–1945), for instance, served as a director of the Berlin Museum
and was an influential collector of Islamic art. He had traveled extensively in
the Middle East and made valuable contributions to the study of Iranian archi-
tecture in the form of publications and documentary photographs. Sarre
worked closely with his protégé, Ernst Herzfeld (1879–1948), who had been
educated in the classics and trained as an architect. Together they curated the
influential 1910 Munich exhibition of Islamic art, which was a milestone in
its scope and execution.11 Exhibitions like these were spectacles of European
fantasies of the Middle East, and their catalogues would become important
guides for the collecting and dissemination of the artifacts displayed.
Europeans saw proof of their superior stewardship of cultural artifacts
when they compared their own concern for national treasures to the relative
lack of interest in and disrepair of historic sites in the Middle East. Not only
were viewpoints about the art and architectural history of the region skewed
to European preoccupations, but the very artifacts under study were often
removed and sometimes destroyed in the process of radical decontextualiza-
tion.12 Although the Europeans were primarily focused on the ancient Baby-
lonian and Pharaonic period, they did include Islamic art in their collections,
although typically the art was represented with easily transported objects like
textiles and ceramics. When they did transport entire buildings or large frag-
ments, these heroic feats only added to the sense of authority which legiti-
mated the dismemberment and expatriation of the region’s architectural
heritage (see fig. I.2). The fate of these objects shifted according to what was
in vogue among European and nationalist scholars, highlighting the close asso-
ciation of academic research with political rivalry and self-definition. It is
important to note here the close a‹nity that would form between oriental-
ist interests in the region and the later co-opting of rhetoric by the newly
formed states of the Middle East.13
Institutions that claimed authority over cultural heritage came to wield

8 Introduction
fig. I.2. Mshatta Palace façade. Photo by Kishwar Rizvi.

significant political influence in the remaining colonies, as well as in the new

states. In the Middle East, directors and o‹cials were appointed from among
European scholars and administrators to head museums and other institu-
tions charged with the study and conservation of Islamic monuments.14 In
Egypt, for example, although the Committee for the Conservation of Mon-
uments of Arab Art, convened in 1881, included three Europeans and five
Arabs, decision making was controlled by European o‹cials. With the
founding of the Museum of Arab Art the cultural authority of the British in
Cairo was secure for the next fifty years, as all decisions regarding the collec-
tion and display of Arab art were filtered through colonial authorities. In a
similar vein, in 1881 Osman Hamdi was put in charge of the Imperial Ottoman
Museum in Istanbul. This museum, however, housed artifacts from classical
antiquity (a Museum of Islamic Art would open, in the Suleymaniyye
Mosque complex, only in 1914).15 In Iran, even before Riza Khan declared him-
self Shah and initiated programs for education, industrialization, and a lib-
eral government, the Society for National Heritage was charged with
overseeing the restoration and conservation, and thus the very identification,
of that nation’s “national heritage.” The society undertook not only to restore

Introduction 9
old monuments, but to “invent” new ones: for example, in 1926, the grave of
the famous eleventh-century poet Firdawsi was dug up and a new, “authen-
tic,” structure, designed by André Godard, was erected in its place (it was com-
pleted in 1934).16 Riza Shah invited Ernst Herzfeld to come to Iran in 1925 to
explain to the nation’s citizenry the importance of the nation’s legacy of Per-
sian art. Herzfeld was also invited to survey crucial Persian monuments and
make recommendations for their preservation and possible reconstruction.17
The result was A Brief Inventory of the Historical Heritage and Edifices of Iran
(1925), a founding document in the Iranians’ understanding of their architec-
tural history. The document’s bias was toward the pre-Islamic past of the
Achaemenid and Sasanian periods; their immediate precedent, the Qajar reign,
was deemed by the Pahlavi nationalists as having been a dishonorable and
deviant moment in Iranian art and history. The ensuing cultural knowledge
was mobilized by political forces in Iran to bolster claims to power and to
legitimate policies and directions of development. Architecture was in the
forefront of the imagining of an Iranian heritage—real and fictional.18
Perhaps the most influential figure writing about Islamic architecture was
Keppel Archibald Creswell (1869–1974).19 Trained at the Technical College
in Finsbury (England) in electrical engineering, Creswell was an accomplished
draftsman. Although his early employment was at Siemens and the London
branch of Deutsche Bank, his real passion was, as he noted, early Muslim
architecture. He trained himself in the architectural history of the Middle
East—in particular, Iran. By 1920, Creswell found himself in Egypt, employed
by the British army, and he took advantage of his appointment to study the
local monuments. At the end of World War I, Creswell requested and
received the help of King Fuªad I of Egypt to assist in funding his magnum
opus, Early Muslim Architecture (1932–40). The project, as Creswell described
it, would catalogue “one of the greatest and most interesting branches of Mus-
lim architecture, which will make known in all parts of the world the glori-
ous achievements, as well as the history and evolution, of modern architecture
in Egypt.”20 The statement is valuable in pointing to the mixed goals increas-
ingly common to students of Islamic architecture in the early twentieth cen-
tury: to both locate and describe a glorious past, and, as Creswell wrote to
King Fuªad, to inspire the future.
The relationship of the architectural and artistic past, present, and future
of Iran was explored by Creswell’s contemporary, the American scholar-
turned-purveyor, Arthur Upham Pope (1881–1969).21 In a 1925 speech given
in the presence of Riza Khan, Pope had advocated the study and preserva-

10 Introduction
tion of Iran’s artistic heritage. According to him, the arts (architecture was
included as the most “formal of visual arts”) were the nation’s greatest assets,
and proof of its place as a great world civilization. In later publications, most
notably the six-volume Survey of Persian Art (1938– 39), Pope and the various
contributors delved deep into the past to find inspiration for Iran’s future.22
As the dedications of Early Muslim Architecture (to King Fu≠ad) and The Sur-
vey of Persian Art (to Riza Shah Pahlavi) make explicit, these books were writ-
ten not only to satisfy academe, but also to assist in the goal of creating a
nationalist ideology.23 In contrast with many of their Western counterparts,
who in seeking a modern architecture for Europe and the United States were
beginning at this moment to advocate a decisive break from historical refer-
ences, Creswell and Pope advanced the idea that the past might itself be recov-
ered in service to the task of nation-building.
Travel literature, catalogues of exhibitions and fairs, and architectural sur-
veys all served to provide a rich and comprehensive documentation of archi-
tecture in the Middle East. Their audiences were as varied as the styles of
representations they employed. Books like these provoked an interest that
resulted in the inclusion of the “non-West” into the canon of Western archi-
tecture as well. From James Fergusson’s History of Architecture in All Countries,
from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (1887) to Banister Fletcher’s A History
of Architecture for the Student, Craftsman, and Amateur, Being a Comparative View
of the Historical Styles from the Earliest Period (1896), architectural history was
conceived as a meta-discipline charged with linking forms and meanings. The
“marginal” architecture of the Middle East was presented in purely formal
terms—metonymic, fragmentary representations in two-dimensional and
decontextualized settings.
In Sir Bannister Fletcher’s History of Architecture, architectural history is a
tree with the great monuments of the non-Western nations apparent on its
lower branches, but unable to grow further (fig. I.3).24 The tree’s trunk rises
out of the Greek and Roman world, and its youngest branches contain the
newest and most dramatic building type, the skyscraper. How then, in
Fletcher’s model, could a nation in the Middle East establish its legitimacy
in architectural terms that would be meaningful to local populations and at
the same time position itself along the main trunk of progress and develop-
ment? How could one be both rooted and modern when civilization required
an inheritance from the past but modernity was seen as a conscious distanc-
ing from one’s roots? The questions unfolded in two directions, toward a legit-
imizing past and toward a promising future, both of which were reciprocally

Introduction 11
fig. I.3. “The Tree of Architecture,” frontispiece from Sir Bannister Fletcher, History
of Architecture (London, B.T. Batsford; New York, C. Scribner’s Sons, 1896).
constructed. The past and its corresponding future were determined by the
exigencies and particularities of each country and its self-representation at
diªerent moments in time.

building a middle east

In 1883, the Fine Arts Academy was established in Istanbul, under the direc-
torship of Osman Hamdi Bey (1842–1910), an artist trained in Paris in the
studio of Jean-Léon Gérôme. The academy was the first of its kind there to
teach architecture, a subject traditionally oªered only to engineering students,
as part of a curriculum that included painting and sculpture. One result of
this was fresh attention given to historicism and the role of the past in con-
structing contemporary architecture, such that architects attempted to revive
Ottoman architecture by applying its formal motifs to new functional pro-
grams such as banks and post o‹ces.25 Architects such as Vedat Bey (1873–
1942) were among the first generation of professionals sent abroad to study.
Like his Iranian contemporaries, he was trained at the École des Beaux-Arts
in Paris, while his compatriot, Kemallettin Bey (1870–1927) was trained at the
Charlottenburg Technische Hochschule in Berlin. Both believed in reviving
older Ottoman architecture as a symbol of the reemergence of Ottoman polit-
ical authority. The exigencies of a new secular Republic after 1923, however,
forced the issue, and led to a rejection of Ottoman forms in favor of greater
architectural abstraction.26
Similar revivals could be witnessed in Iran and Egypt; however, in each
case the architectural history worthy of revival was markedly diªerent. Qajar
architects were selective in their borrowing of symbols from Achaemenid
(559– 350 bce) and Sasanian (224–461) architecture, in opposition to the great
monuments of Islamic dynasties. Although European-style palaces and dec-
orative motifs were also employed, imperial iconography—in the form of
large sculptural programs as well as tile embellishments—was taken from
pre-Islamic architecture.27 Similarly, architects writing and building in Egypt—
in particular, Cairo—distanced themselves from the immediate history of
Ottoman architecture to seek indigenous solutions from the Mamluk era
(1250–1517). The “medieval” representations of contemporary architecture
were certainly curious choices given the ideas of progress and reform that
often accompanied them.28 “Modern” architecture, in contrast, was equated
with the West and thus beyond the reach of local architectural expression,
an attitude that would change from the 1930s onward.
During the Qajar and Ottoman periods, schools of architecture were typ-

Introduction 13
ically led by foreigners or local elite educated in Europe. The Frenchman André
Godard (1881–1965) is representative. A graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts,
he worked in Iraq, Egypt, and Afghanistan before arriving in Iran. In 1928 he
was appointed to the post of director of the first museum of antiquities in
Tehran, the Iran Bastan Museum.29 Along with being placed in charge of
archeological and preservation projects, he was also the first Dean of the Fac-
ulty of Fine Arts at Tehran University, directing the education of future archi-
tects. Like other foreign architects of the time, Godard found inspiration for
Iran’s future in its past. For the design of the Iran Bastan Museum project,
for instance, Godard collaborated with another expatriate French archeolo-
gist turned architect, Maxime Siroux (see fig. I.4). The monumental arch at
the building’s entrance did not simply emulate the Sasanian remnants at
Ctesiphon, its designers believed that it improved the original with more refined
details. In adapting antique forms to new building types and new political
programs, Godard borrowed motifs from a range of sources and invented
quasi-historical forms for new projects, much as archaeological artifacts were
decontextualized to fit vitrines and historical timelines in the museums he
directed. In many ways, Godard’s designs were congruent with the larger con-
tours of eclecticism. Other architects, in Europe and the United States as well
as in the Middle East, made use of historical form in an attempt to adapt to
modern circumstances.30
Mohsen Forughi (1907–1982) is representative of those architects originally
from the Middle East but trained in Europe and dedicated to bringing West-
ern practices to their homelands. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in
Paris and returned to Iran soon afterward to launch his architectural career.
Although having little practical experience, he had acquired the École’s sig-
nature sensitivity to historical form and compositional virtuosity, and so was
immediately welcomed into government service and soon won important
commissions, such as the Faculty of Technology at Tehran University, built
with Maxime Siroux (see fig. I.5). Forughi’s rationalist approach to design and
his use of more abstract forms contrasted with the work of older colleagues.
His buildings are adorned with a minimum of ornament, and the historical
references are restrained— evident, for example, in the limited use of glazed
tiles at the entrance to his Iranian Senate building in Tehran. Unlike Godard’s
Iran Bastan Museum, built in brick, Forughi turned to reinforced concrete
for his public commissions, which included hospitals, ministries, and bank
buildings.31 The use of concrete may be seen as an important deviation from
the use of the traditional material, one that pointed to the iconic role of mod-
ern architecture in the nationalist ideology.

14 Introduction
fig. I.4. Iran Bastan Museum, Tehran, André Godard and Maxime Siroux. Photo by
Talinn Grigor.

In Turkey, the early proponents of a new style that based its progressive
posture partly on a rejection of historical form were imported from Europe.
Rather than romanticizing local cultural heritage, like the previous genera-
tion, they brought with them the functionalist emphasis of a developing mod-
ern movement spurred by industrialization and rapid urbanization, as well
as the background of European classicism and its long-standing values of sym-
metry and monumentality. The German planner Hermann Jansen (1869–1947)
was invited to design and implement the master plan for the new capital,
Ankara. He was followed by the Swiss Ernst Egli (1893–1974), who was
brought in as the head of the Academy of Fine Arts. Egli’s designs were self-
consciously abstract and aloof from any local context, embodying a kind of
architectural self-determination—that is, form generated from function and
methods of construction—that would mirror Ataturk’s ideals of a nation free
from Ottoman malfeasance.32 Subsequent Turkish architects incorporated
this o‹cial nationalist aesthetic into their “new architecture,” which featured
cubic forms and a fondness for grids: a language of rationalized form evoked
the clarity and single-mindedness of the new government.33
Much of these architects’ cultural authority resided in their international
experience, either as émigrés and foreign experts, or as professionals trained
in foreign schools. Their education enabled them to import the motifs and

Introduction 15
fig. I.5. Tehran University, Faculty of Technology, Mohsen Forughi. From Mina Mare-
fat, “The Protagonists Who Shaped Modern Tehran,” in Téhéran, capitale bicentenaire,
ed. C. Adle (Paris–Tehran, 1992).

methods of Western Europe, thereby helping to make the dominant politi-

cal force in the region the cultural standard as well. Although such figures were
channels to Western practices, their expertise seemed to be self-contained
and therefore transportable, and their choice of locale in which to practice
appeared to demonstrate self-determination and to personify global citizen-
ship. The émigré or foreign expert was thus a representative figure of moder-
nity, with transnational experience a prerequisite to regional inflections
within a larger modernism, and with local rootings of modern architecture
vindicating its universal ambitions.34 The Turkish architect Sedad Eldem
stands out in this context for working out his modernist designs through an

16 Introduction
idealized Turkish house that he conceptualized after encountering in Ger-
many publications of Frank Lloyd Wright’s prairie houses in Illinois.35 The
heightened status of émigré or foreign-trained architects would continue after
World War II, although such figures were often engaged with larger-scale plan-
ning eªorts, such as Constantinos Doxiades, and in many instances evinced
an overriding concern for technological solutions based on universal physi-
cal facts, such as strength of materials, without explicit cultural references.
Ultimately, the émigré or foreign-trained architect turned out to be a figure
with limited historical appeal and only one of a number of ways to represent
or embody international mobility.
As the preceding examples suggest, two design approaches prevailed in
the early-twentieth-century Middle East: selective adaptation of historical
forms to suit new building programs, and experimentation with the abstract-
ing tendencies then emerging internationally. In many instances, combining
these approaches resulted in designs that could recapitulate an ideal of
nationhood rooted in cultural heritage, yet progressive and growing. Along-
side the cultural constructions of archeologists and art historians, the con-
ceptual spectrum of these approaches helped direct and frame the building
of nations.
The World War II ascendance of an international style of modern architec-
ture was characterized by cubic massing and elemental, unornamented forms,
along with a present-tense commitment to the most advanced materials and
methods of construction. As the editors of Progressive Architecture insisted in
1948: “Modern design—design of our time—is not a style. It is a solution to
modern problems in modern terms.”36 In other words, modernism was inti-
mately related to the vital spirit of the industrial age. It was the logical out-
come, in aesthetic terms, both of modernization—a network of infrastructures
that underpinned an advanced material civilization that included mass
sanitation, mass housing, and mass transportation; and of modernity—the
acceptance of systemic societal change triggered not simply by technological
developments, but by the embrace of change itself as a constituent factor of
everyday life. Nations that had become politically independent if not exactly
free of foreign influence typically intensified their modernization program
in an eªort to keep pace with neighboring countries and with world opin-
ion. This international style of modern architecture contributed in several
ways to the continuing construction of a cultural concept of the Middle East:
through its claims to a universal applicability that cast the Middle East as one
in a series of successful instances of modernism taking root in distinct locales;

Introduction 17
by repositioning historical motifs in relation to modern practice; and by focus-
ing design attention on generalized, supposedly regional themes, such as a
hot climate, which could be mitigated by a modern approach.
The dissemination of values held to be both Western and universal was a
keynote of international politics after World War II, with the United Nations
emblematic of such aspirations. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
for example, approved in 1948 by the United Nations’ General Assembly, which
included some seven Middle Eastern countries, stressed rights such as per-
sonal privacy, private property, leisure, access to social services, freedom of
speech, free choice in marriage, and free choice in nationality. The United
Nations approved a “symbolic figure” for the teaching of its universal ideals,
a deracinated everyman standing atop a globe that is likewise featureless but
for its gridded surface (see fig. I.6). In terms drawn directly from the Decla-
ration, this figure “represents all of us, everyone on earth, whoever we are,
without distinction of any kind such as race, color, sex, language, religion,
political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or any other
status.”37 The power of this unmarked monad is its presumption of a univer-
sal humanity underlying cultural diªerences, which become then mere cir-
cumstance. As an anticipation of impending individuation and a cipher for
pure possibility, it stands as well for another, related ideal, namely, that of eco-
nomic development. Indeed, an unquestioned faith in the goodness of devel-
opment, in terms of both new goods and markets for global capital and
material and social benefits for local populations, is an often overlooked but
nonetheless fundamental aspect of modernism. International institutions such
as the United Nations were crucial in helping to articulate and promulgate
such beliefs. Of course, declaring universal rights and implementing them
turned out to be entirely diªerent matters.
An architectural accord with such ideals was evident in the design of the
United Nations’ Secretariat building itself, begun in 1947. As Sibel Bozdovan
notes in her essay, the elegant glass-walled slab was the leading symbol of a
“new supranational aesthetic of bureaucratic and technocratic e‹ciency”
that evoked a prosperous future precisely by forgoing cultural references.
The abstracted forms of modern architecture seemed to herald wider par-
ticipation in society by sponsoring a symbolic franchise accessible to all social
strata, in contrast with, say, the ornate and costly ornament of traditional
elites. It signified traits common to an economic class, rather than to kin or
ethnic origin. In terms of actual construction programs in the Middle East,
corollaries to the Declaration include an emphasis on mass housing and
attempts to visualize the city in its entirety and to plan for future urban growth.

18 Introduction
fig. I.6. “Symbolic Figure,” from Stephen Fenichell and Phillip Andrews, The United
Nations: Blueprint for Peace (Philadelphia: John C. Winston Publishing, 1951).
Also evident is the use of a common language of stripped cubic forms and
greater attention to questions of building type, along with a new role for the
architect, who shifted from providing custom designs for the elite to a more
socially central role of accommodating the larger polity.
In the Middle East particularly, a central tenet of postwar modernism—
the irrelevance of the past for the problems of the present—swiftly came into
conflict with an earlier ideal of nationhood rooted in ethnic genealogy but
growing toward material progress. The “flying carpet” entry canopy at the
1955 Istanbul Hilton Hotel, by the American architectural firm of Skidmore,
Owings and Merrill in collaboration with Sedad Eldem, for instance, evoked
an orientalist fantasy, but it was an ancillary flourish to a grid of rooms and
a sequence of pools, lawns, and lounges serving burgers and soda that was,
as Bozdovan notes, “the paradigm of benevolent and democratic capitalist
society.”38 In such ways, traditional forms were reintroduced by modernism
itself; the immediately recognizable motifs could appear as proof of their per-
sistence, however denatured. Thus, modern architecture, when it took up
some notion of local heritage, could represent itself as the healing praxis for
that which it had injured.
A “burden of representation”—a term we feel aptly describes this situation—
strained both tendencies, as all architects in service to new nations tried to
find forms that would make sense of the novel configurations of land mar-
shaled under new flags and the varied combinations of ethnic groups that
were expected to cohere under new systems of law. It was a task that occu-
pied twentieth-century architects and builders in the Middle East in ways
profoundly diªerent than before, and despite important similarities, in ways
strikingly diªerent from those of their contemporaries in Europe. Although
similar questions regarding a modern architecture—that is, an architecture
aesthetically commensurate with modern society—likewise troubled Euro-
pean architecture, in the Middle East they seem to refract and turn in upon
themselves. Among the questions that can be asked and that continue to be
relevant to students and practitioners today are these: How does one build
for a culture that is grounded in rich history and in strong continuing tradi-
tions and also trying to establish a distance with that history? How might
one represent a culture to itself as a means of establishing what that culture
might become? And how can one make use of an architectural paradigm
that has already marked a culture as unequal, or at least lagging behind on
an evolutionary track, to now represent that culture as a political equal among
others like it?
Greater emphasis after World War II on technological solutions is evident

20 Introduction
in the attention architects gave to finding ways to mitigate the climate. Cli-
mate had been growing in importance in Western universities as an academic
subject related to human welfare. But its adoption as a primary design prob-
lem helped to consolidate a sense of the unity of the Middle East at the same
time that modernism could be represented as being indiªerent to political
boundaries, much like the climate itself.39 Although always subject to local
conditions, climate is both global and trans-historical. As Josep Lluis Sert, archi-
tect of the 1955 American Embassy in Baghdad, suggested, climate is one of
several “eternal factors” most deserving of the architect’s attention. Modern
architecture could appear as a technical response to facts of nature, rather
than as a displacement of more traditional accommodations to patterns of
weather. However sensible, long-standing customs, such as adapting activi-
ties to the daily and seasonal path of the sun, could be seen as un-self-reflec-
tive responses to weather, in contrast to modernism’s rational analyses and
all-encompassing solutions.40 In the long run, however, design rationales based
on an appeal to climate failed to distinguish one political entity from another.
A postwar emphasis on technological approaches to design also meant that
architects would tend to focus on specifically modern issues, such as accom-
modating automobiles, or on distinctly architectural problems, such as the
physical properties and aesthetic implications of new materials. With a man-
date to be modern driving them, many architects were predisposed to the
use of those materials that served their professional agenda. At times this
could lead to rather strained assertions. In support of his embassy design, for
instance, Sert claimed he had used concrete because it was a local material,
although it had not been made in Baghdad until 1952 and was in any case in
short supply, as was the timber needed for formwork. His decision to use steel
for the Embassy’s window sash, he said, was in response to the local prob-
lem of termites. In 1957, looking back on a decade of building in Iraq, Ellen
Jawdat, an architect and the wife of Iraqi architect Nizar Jawdat, whom she
met when both studied at Harvard, wrote that modernism had forced a divide
between an architecture “which is technically possible and that which can eco-
nomically be achieved under local building conditions.” An architect could
be modern only by choosing the former. Concrete, for example, was impor-
tant for iconographic as well as functional reasons, whereas brick bore no
significance for modernism. For architects, this mindset would favor one sort
of material over another, such as concrete (modern) over brick (traditional),
even when the use of brick would have been the most e‹cient use of exist-
ing materials and existing skilled labor.
The eªect of what seem at first to have been merely aesthetic decisions

Introduction 21
turned out to be enormous. In Iraq, local o‹cials and foreign observers wor-
ried about a shortage of skilled labor that would hobble or at least slow mod-
ernization. But even Lord Salter, a distinguished British politician and former
minister for economic aªairs, acting in the early 1950s as consultant to the
Iraq Development Board, noted that labor could only be said to be in short
supply in relation to planned development. In Iraq, he said, politicians were
beholden to a Western model of industrial development that emphasized ways
to “utilize fully the country’s potential physical resources rather than to
increase the welfare of its people.”41 Decisions by architects channel the use
of physical resources, sometimes, as Salter suggests, to the disadvantage of
other issues, such as full employment.
At the same time that these developments helped to reinforce mod-
ernism’s core principles, they also redefined them: attention to climate led
to an often monumental emphasis on technique, which, being ill-suited for
the range of building tasks necessary to modernization, began to strain its
underlying technological determinism. Questions of architectural represen-
tation remained inescapable in the Middle East because the primary issue was
to make modernity and independence manifest, to visibly demonstrate with
material form claims of political parity with former colonial and hegemonic
Western powers. Modernist flirtations with vernacular architecture in the
West were extended to a much more explicit concern for questions of his-
torical and regional context, matters that were paramount to nations attempt-
ing to articulate their legitimacy and importance.42 Preserving tradition and
modernization were posited as oppositional goals that could not be resolved.
Although much of this eªort would involve new infrastructural projects like
roads and railways, shipping facilities, airports, urban water and sanitation
systems, and so on, the most visible portions nearly always involved archi-
tecture. Whether providing housing for immigrants streaming into cities, or
a monumental government center, new buildings were both the means and
the very symbol of participation in Western ideals of progress and develop-
ment promoted to foreign investors and aggressive neighbors.
Issues regarding representation also came to the fore through the work
of the Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy. Like many of his colleagues, Fathy
explored Beaux-Arts-inspired designs through much of the 1930s, but later he
turned his attention to housing for the rural poor, the use of traditional mate-
rials such as mud brick, and vernacular traditions. Even his evident interest
in addressing issues of climate was pursued through careful manipulation of
orientation and the size and location of openings, the use of shading devices,
and generous courtyards that would be at least partially shaded throughout

22 Introduction
the day. Although his 1948 project for New Gourna was criticized in terms
of its economic viability, it was richly imagined and led to a series of impor-
tant positions for Fathy advising the Egyptian government, as well as con-
sulting with other architects across the Middle East. The Iraqi architect Rifat
Chadirji, to take another example, studied architecture in London, but upon
his return to Baghdad in 1952 he became involved with preserving the urban
fabric that was often threatened by modernization projects. In the following
years, he worked to incorporate vernacular motifs with new materials and a
larger scale of modern architecture. Iraq Consult, the firm he established,
became one of the region’s most important architectural practices.43
Issues of representation were only sharpened with the rising power of the
United States in the years following World War II. In the American Embassy
building program, for instance, a number of architects, many of whom were
not American by birth, were asked to represent the United States to the non-
American audience of the host country as a powerful industrialized nation
that was nonetheless sensitive to the local interests of its host country.
Embassy architects were asked to express “such qualities as dignity, strength,
and neighborly sympathy.” Issues of representation were explicit and inter-
nally contradictory, and architects struggled to protect core modernist prin-
ciples of subordinating representation to practical matters of function and
structure even as they added ornamental flourishes to indicate “neighborly
sympathy.”44 What one author called “Ornamented Modern,” had, he wrote
in 1959, “crystallized, in large measure, as the result of a U.S. State Depart-
ment policy regarding the construction of embassies abroad.”45 Questions
of ornament and representation in modern architecture were triggered not
by the 1960s postmodern critique of modernism, but emerged in the context
of decolonization and nationalism, in an optimistic if ambiguous confidence
in modern architecture to simultaneously represent the rooted particulari-
ties of a given place and population as well as their progress toward future
prospects.

Narratives of modernism in the Middle East have by and large relied upon
categories based on Western experience. Temporal divisions such as “prewar”
or “postwar” reflect systemic changes that took place in the West following
World War II, such as Europe’s enormous reconstruction eªort and the trans-
formation of the American economy from military to consumer goods and
its emergence upon the global stage. Such labels also reflect an implicit belief
in the homogeneity of temporal experience. That is to say, the present is itself
defined by the rapid and incessant changes wrought by modernity; therefore,

Introduction 23
to participate in the present means to embrace change and to demonstrate
that embrace with cultural signs and material forms.
Although aªected by World War II, the experience of the Middle East
was diªerent, attesting to the tenuous coherence of the very idea of a Middle
East. Iran and Turkey were already independent nations in the 1920s, whereas
a number of North African nations remained colonies into the 1950s.
Somewhere in between was Iraq—autonomous after World War I, o‹cially
independent in 1932 but still eªectively under British influence, occupied by
the British throughout the Second World War, re-independent in 1947, and
only freed from British authority in 1958 after a coup led by Abdul Karim
Qassim. With many such changes of administration, grand modernization
projects were initiated, redirected, or shut down. With each iteration of
national identity, diªerent actors appeared in an altered context, and newly
independent governments made as much or as little use of new technolo-
gies and cultural heritage as did their colonial predecessors. Considered across
the wide range of the Middle East, such a pattern amounts to a kind of punc-
tuated development: rather than being explained by a gradual or even a fitful
assimilation of Western practices, modernism in the Middle East evolved in
a geographically and temporally disjointed manner.46 New symbols were
brandished and old ones recycled; various modernisms were accepted,
amended, rejected.
Perhaps the most important development since the 1970s has been the
resurgence of Islam as a touchstone of nationalist discourse. This is best exem-
plified in Iran, but is also evident throughout the Middle East and South Asia.
In countries as distinct as Turkey and Algeria, Islam has been an increasingly
galvanizing form of socio-political expression. Religious identity has re-
emerged in political and civic discourse and has thus joined individual status
and national or ethnic origin as a major factor in the production and study
of architecture. Religious identification has lead to a new, hybrid type of mod-
ern architecture, evident not only in the Middle East but in other global con-
texts from India to the United States.
New patrons promoting religious ideology as a source of political agency
have sponsored wholesale reinterpretations of traditional building types. This
trend is unlike earlier ones involving the application of traditional motifs onto
contemporary structures and state patronage in service to modernization. It
is also unlike the token ornamentalism and corporate sponsorship evident in
buildings like the Istanbul Hilton. Two examples can begin to illustrate this
new development. The first is the tomb of the patriarch of the Iranian revolu-
tion, Ayatollah Khomeini (d. 1988), whose body is interred in an enormous

24 Introduction
fig. I.7. Tomb of Ayatollah Khomeini, Tehran, Iran. Photo by Kishwar Rizvi.

structure on the outskirts of Tehran. The building is in the form of a tradi-

tional Shi’i shrine, but it is built entirely of contemporary materials such as
concrete and prefabricated metal, with a space-frame interior (see fig. I.7).
The state-sponsored tomb was overseen by Khomeini’s son, Ahmad, and
designed by the architect Mohammed Tehrani. It functions simultaneously
as a religious edifice and a state monument, frequented as often by pilgrims
as by diplomats.47
A similar bridging of temporal and formal boundaries is seen in the
Kocatepe Mosque in Ankara (1967–87).48 The massive mosque, with a park-
ing garage and shopping mall in its lower levels, is similar to the tomb of
Khomeini in evoking a traditional style (see fig. I.8). But unlike the case of
the imperial patrons who built Ottoman mosques in previous centuries, the
Kocatepe Mosque was financed by the populist Welfare Party (Refa Partesi).
In both these cases, that of the Khomeini tomb and that of the Kocatepe
Mosque, religion, as co-opted by the state, is the driving factor in the archi-
tectural program. Similarly, traditional rather than modern form is the start-
ing, if not exactly the concluding, point for design.
Critics of the populist architecture these buildings represent consider
them reactionary and anti-modern. But these same critics can laud the trans-
lation of traditional motifs into modern terms evident in a building such as

Introduction 25
 fig. I.8. Kocatepe Mosque,
Ankara, Turkey. Photo by Sibel
Bozdovan.

Jean Nouvel’s 1988 Insitut du Monde Arabe, an institution founded by elite

Gulf Arabs and U.N. diplomats to refine the image of the Arab world in the
West. Whatever such attitudes say about the architectural practices in ques-
tion, they also point to the limits of modernist discourse. Architects and his-
torians of modernism are mute or often vituperative regarding buildings like
the Kocatepe Mosque, since they lack the evaluative categories to weigh the
cultural significance, if not the aesthetic merit, of populist architecture.
Recently, the actual rather than just symbolic presence of Muslim com-
munities throughout the West has only made the situation more complex.
Diasporic communities are growing rapidly throughout the northern hemi-
sphere, remaking urban districts in cities such as Paris and New York with
new religious and cultural institutions, shops catering to varied ethnicities,
unfamiliar forms of dress, and even diªerent patterns of occupying the street.
Identity in the Muslim diaspora draws from notions of Middle Eastern
nationality and religious a‹liation, but is addressed to its various Western
contexts. Whereas the forms, materials, practices, and cultural values of
modern architecture had migrated to the Middle East throughout the
twentieth century, the Middle East—its people, its architecture, its culture—

26 Introduction
is now migrating to the West. The hybrid buildings that result from this
process in cities all over the world require a sharpened focus on the present
and provide a fresh opportunity to rethink the future of modernism and
architecture.

structure of the book

The central ambition of Modernism and the Middle East is to serve as a set of
detailed case studies that contextualize architectural form and practice within
the discourses of national and postcolonial identity as they have developed
in the Middle East. But if the strength of an edited volume of essays when
taken as a whole is the variety of perspectives that respond to a common set
of questions, then the editors’ charge will inevitably be to emphasize the areas
of congruency without compromising the range and depth of individual
points of view. To achieve this balancing act, we have set thematic and geo-
graphic boundaries that focus this volume as well as limit it. As a whole, some
degree of temporal breadth is reached by including essays that touch upon
every decade of the twentieth century. Similarly, nations from Libya to Iraq
come up for discussion, and thus oªer geographic breadth. Four essays focus
on Mandate Palestine, Israel, and the Occupied Territories, which reflects
not only the current high level of scholarship on these places, but also their
political—and perhaps, as mentioned above, conceptual—importance to the
region. They also demonstrate how a single physical location is subject to
conflicting political claims and historical narratives generated to legitimate
those claims. In other words, the geographic coordinates may remain more
or the less the same for these four essays, but the “place” is in every instance
quite diªerent. While the tension between regional relevance and interna-
tional validity structures many of the individual essays, Modernism and the
Middle East as a whole aims to transcend that dichotomy to arrive at a richer
and more dynamic way to understand a region that is the site both of deep
traditions and of rapid modernization. The collected essays vividly demon-
strate the political dimensions of creating the built environment, of subse-
quently inhabiting it, and, finally, of deploying it for symbolic ends.
Modernism and the Middle East begins with a section entitled “Colonial Con-
structions,” in which the politics of domination are situated within the inter-
action between Europe and the Middle East. The two essays presented here
question the balance between tradition and modernity that in the 1930s was
seen by many to be the goal of European colonial patronage in the Middle
East. Annabel Wharton, in her essay “Jerusalem Remade,” shows how the

Introduction 27
region was reconfigured as a haven of traditional architecture, in contrast with
the new building campaigns of Jewish settlers and in preparation for Euro-
pean pilgrims who would expect modern comforts along with the historic
and holy urban fabric. Wharton makes evident the crucial role of represen-
tation in the modern-day shaping of Jerusalem as an ancient city with a vis-
ible architectural heritage serving as an analog of religious insight. Jerusalem,
in other words, was remade in the 1930s so that Protestant pilgrims, in par-
ticular, could bear witness to their own religious sentiments.
Brian McLaren’s essay, “Modern Architecture, Preservation and the Dis-
course on Local Culture in Italian Colonial Libya,” describes Italian appro-
priation of Libyan architecture from the late 1920s to the late 1930s, as Italians
attempted to legitimate their occupation of Libya through architecture.
McLaren reveals the racial underpinnings of the sophisticated and self-
conscious rationalist discourse of Italian architects that guided architectural
policy in Libya, and then traces those policies as they shifted from scholarly
and preservation-minded modes to an increasingly didactic and eclectic use
of Libyan formal motifs. Whereas earlier designs had been abstract and in
keeping with developments in Italy, later designs were more traditional in form
and conceived largely for Italian tourists, who were proving to be an increas-
ingly important part of the colony’s economy.
The second section, “Building the Nation,” takes as its premise that the
primary agenda for twentieth-century architects and builders in the Middle
East was to construct an architectural vocabulary for nations newly liberated
either from European colonial or local imperial regimes. In all, the underly-
ing theme is one of representation: political, architectural, and ideological.
The first two essays focus on the role of architects and institutions in medi-
ating the various encounters of modernism with older ways of building. As
Magnus Bernhardsson argues in “1001 Fantasies: Development, Architecture,
and Modernizing the Past in Baghdad, 1950–1958,” institutions are devices
that embody these contradictions, as they are simultaneously predicated on
programs of modernization and development and embedded in the society
and place that is going to be developed. Bernhardsson reveals that the indi-
vidual architects’ proposals for the greater Baghdad plan, sponsored by the
Iraqi Development Board (IDB), were secondary to the plan itself, with a
mandate for Western-styled development the common underpinning of any
specific proposal. The IDB programs emphasized the government’s ambiva-
lence toward its own cultural inheritance, as well as the perils of elite spon-
sorship of a conspicuous building program aimed at a weakly defined
citizenry that may not comprehend or approve of the government’s ambi-

28 Introduction
tions. As Bernhardsson shows, the majority of Iraqis were unaware of the
IDB’s activities or of its mandate for change. Panayiota Pyla’s essay, “Bagh-
dad’s Urban Restructuring, 1958: Constantinos Doxiades, Aesthetics, and the
Politics of Nation Building,” examines the IDB plan for Baghdad in greater
detail, focusing in particular on the work of the Greek architect and plan-
ner Constantinos Doxiadis. Pyla shows how Doxiadis’s simultaneous claims
of technocratic objectivity and cultural sensitivity meshed with those of the
IDB. She reads the Baghdad plan closely to trace the various transformations
by which specific cultural traits were isolated by the planners and then accom-
modated in fixed urban forms. In “Democracy, Development, and the Ameri-
canization of Turkish Architectural Culture in the 1950s,” Sibel Bozdovan
surveys the shift in Turkey in the 1950s from Europe to the United States as a
reference point for modern architectural practices that became a progressive
counterpoint to vestigial orientalist ideas, a hopeful amalgam that evaporated
in 1960 following a military coup. She follows individual designers and signal
projects, most notably Sedad Eldem and his work on the Hilton Hotel in
Istanbul, to argue that there were as many modernisms as there were modern
architects.
The following three essays sharpen the book’s focus by examining the case
of Israel and Palestine, a region that, in terms of the premises of Modernism
and the Middle East, is founded on a tension between its historic past and its
promising future. Roy Kozlovsky’s essay, “Temporal States of Architecture:
The Provisional Infrastructure of Immigration in Israel,” argues that the
new Israeli government managed the rapid immigration of the late 1940s and
1950s by appropriating modernist tenets of transitoriness and ephemerality.
Kozlovsky shows how government agencies were able to abrogate private
property rights in the name of the state’s larger transition to stability. With
modernism decisively established as the visible vocabulary of progress and
material development, professional debate in the 1960s regarding landmark
projects in Jerusalem began to shift toward a revived interest in traditional
forms and a picturesque sensibility, as described by Alona Nitzan-Shiftan in
her essay, “Modernisms in Conflict: Architecture and Cultural Politics in Post-
1967 Jerusalem.” An international advisory committee, relying on a modernist
posture of objective disinterest, argued for greater use of historical references,
while an Israeli team of designers called for an unabashed modernism to rep-
resent the capital of a progressive nation that was focused unblinkingly on
the future. Finally, by looking at the ways Palestinians have memorialized the
1956 massacre at Kufr Qasim, which was at first denied by Israel and then
summarily rushed through its military court, Waleed Khleif and Susan Sly-

Introduction 29
omovics, in their essay “Palestinian Remembrance Days and Practices,”
move well beyond the use of built form as a kind of civic representation to
reach an ideal of “historical justice” that nonetheless centers on the impor-
tance of place and cultural memory. Rather than recognize the tragedy with
a memorial that would, in any case, have been compromised, even if it had
been allowed, the making and reciting of poetry became a ritual practice of
memorialization. Memory, the authors imply, can become monumental
even in the absence of any built monuments.
The concluding section, “Overviews and Openings,” reestablishes a
broader outlook. In “Global Ambition and Local Knowledge,” Gwendolyn
Wright emphasizes the tension between the modern and the traditional in
Beirut, Cairo, and Riyadh, mostly in the period of the 1950s and 1960s. As
she sheds light on the intellectual constructs and eªects of modernism,
Wright also lays out essential questions of global processes and local
agency—the essence of postcolonial tensions—that remain pressing in our
own day. Nezar AlSayyad’s essay, “From Modernism to Globalization: The
Middle East in Context,” brings issues discussed in the preceding essays to
the present day. He retraces how the idea of a cohesive Middle East was artic-
ulated and reinforced in the twentieth century, even as he shows through
varied examples how tenuous this geopolitical entity truly is. Pointing toward
greater rather than less cultural diªerentiation in the process of globaliza-
tion, AlSayyad confirms the need to look beyond formal similarities to com-
prehend the many unique articulations of cultural identity in the place that
is called the “Middle East.”

notes

1. On orientalism, the seminal text is that of Edward Said (Orientalism [New

York: Vintage, 1978]). For a critique of Said’s work, see Aijaz Ahmad, “Oriental-
ism and After: Ambivalence and Metropolitan Location in the Work of Edward
Said,” in In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992).
2. For a collection of essays that deal with various aspects of modernization
and the Middle East, see Albert Hourani, Philip S. Khoury, and Mary C. Wilson,
eds., The Modern Middle East: A Reader (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
3. Crimea, e.g., was taken in 1774 by the Russians, while Egypt was occupied
by Napoleon’s army in 1798. In 1828 the Russians further asserted their military
strength by absorbing Georgia and parts of Iranian Azerbaijan.
4. On the “modernization” of Cairo, see Doris Behrens-Abouseif, Azbakiyya

30 Introduction
and Its Environs (Le Caire: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1985); and
Nezar AlSayyad, Irene A. Bierman, and Nasser Rabbat, eds., Making Cairo Medieval
(Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2005).
5. Libya was occupied by the Italians in 1911, and in 1914 Egypt became a
protectorate of Britain. In addition, the kingdom of Morocco became a protec-
torate of France.
6. The seminal texts on the subject of nationalism are Eric Hobsbawm and
Terrence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (New York: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1992); and Benedict R. O’G. Anderson, Imagined Communities (London:
Verso, 1983).
7. A recent overview is Paul Stevens, “Oil and Development,” in A Compan-
ion to the History of the Middle East, ed. Youssef M. Choveiri (Malden, Mass.: Black-
well, 2005).
8. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History,” in
Unpacking Europe, ed. Salah Hassan and Iftikhar Dadi (Rotterdam: NAi Publish-
ers, 2001).
9. Archeology is discussed by Stephen Vernoit in “The Rise of Islamic
Archeology” (Muqarnas 14 [1997]: 1–10). Usually, for these scholars, Ottoman arti-
facts were emblems of a corrupt and impotent rule. On travelers to Iran, see Jen-
nifer Scarce, “Persian Art through the Eyes of Nineteenth-Century British
Travelers,” Bulletin of British Society for Middle Eastern Studies 8, no. 1 (1981): 38–50.
10. The primary task for European colonialists was to inventory their newly
procured assets, for which they used scholarly tools such as more-or-less stan-
dardized survey formats, with their structuring biological metaphors of stylistic
birth, flowering, and decay, and the catalogue, a format generally understood to
be authoritative for fitting specific fragments of past art into grand narratives of
cultural progress. The aesthetic categories and intellectual preoccupations of Euro-
pean scholars determined both the merit and the historical value of the entire
field of Islamic art and architecture. Grand imperial projects, such as palace com-
plexes and mosques, attracted the most attention, while sites of what would now
be termed “popular culture,” such as local shrines and bazaars, received little
notice, except in discussions about the mythical “Islamic City.” At that time, some
monuments were destroyed only to be rebuilt in what were deemed more
authentic ways, while others were fabricated anew on the basis of the national-
ist rediscovery of their importance. In Iran, Susa and other pre-Islamic sites were
studied from as early as 1884, but it was not until the beginning of the twentieth
century that much attention was given to Islamic sites.
11. Herzfeld subsequently joined the German dig at Assur and completed a
dissertation on the Achaemenid palace at Pasargade, in Iran. Still a young man,

Introduction 31
Herzfeld had also completed a survey of the monuments of the province of Luris-
tan in Iran, as well as a preliminary report on the great Abbasid city of Samarra.
With permission from local authorities to conduct excavations in Iraq, he defined
the physical contours and set the temporal limits of Samarra. This latter project
was to be Herzfeld’s masterwork, and he returned to Iraq to conduct two seasons
of excavations, in 1911 and 1912–13. With the changed political climate of Iraq under
British rule and in the wake of World War I, Herzfeld, along with other Germans
throughout the Middle East, was expelled, and so forced to shift his scholarly focus.
On Sarre, Herzfeld, and their contemporaries, see Alaister Northedge, “Creswell,
Herzfeld, and Samarra,” Muqarnas 8 (1991): 74–93; Robert Hillenbrand, “Creswell
and Contemporary Central European Scholarship,” Muqarnas 8 (1991): 23– 35; and
Yuri Bregel, “Barthold and Modern Oriental Studies,” IJMES 12 (1980): 385–403.
For more comprehensive analysis, see the collection in Ann C. Gunter and Stefan R.
Hauser, eds., Ernst Herzfeld and the Development of Near Eastern Studies, 1900–1950
(Leiden: Brill, 2005). A partial overview of early exhibitions, limited primarily to
European contexts, is provided in D. Roxburgh, “Au Bonheur des Amateurs: Col-
lecting and Exhibiting Islamic Art, ca. 1880–1910,” Ars Orientalis 30 (2000): 9– 38,
in which he discusses the modes of display in light of contemporary taste.
12. The Mshatta palace façade was removed to Berlin in the early twentieth
century, as a presentation to Kaiser Wilhelm II. Objects from the Middle East,
like carpets, might be valued for their appearance in European paintings, as were
Holbein or Polonaise carpets. An example of the complete dismemberment of
ceramics from their original sites is seen in the wholesale removal of the mihrab
from a fourteenth-century mosque in Isfahan, which was purchased by the Met-
ropolitan Museum of Art in 1939.
13. On the profound complicity between orientalist scholarship and nation-
alism, see Edmund Burke III, “Orientalism and World History: Representing Mid-
dle Eastern Nationalism and Islamism in the Twentieth Century,” Theory and
Society 27, no. 4 (August 1998): 489–507.
14. As has been noted, “The Europeans were not just Europeans, but citizens
of powers that were endlessly maneuvering for advantage in Egypt” (Donald Mal-
colm Reid, “Cultural Imperialism and Nationalism: The Struggle to Define and
Control the Heritage of Arab Art in Egypt,” IJMES 29 [1992]: 63).
15. Many museum administrators were also interested in surveying the built
landscape, a task shared by other colonial o‹cials, such as geographers, census-
takers, and urban planners. Their task was to preserve those sites considered to
be part of the long and evolutionary narrative of world history.
16. In an attempt to assert the Aryan claims of the Pahlavi dynasty, the remains
of Firdawsi and others were then examined and subjected to racial examination.

32 Introduction
This material has been explored by Talin Grigor in “Cultivat(ing) Modernities:
The Society for National Heritage, Political Propaganda, and Public Architecture
in Twentieth-Century Iran,” Ph.D. diss., MIT, 2005.
17. See Talin Grigor, “Recultivating ‘Good Taste’: The Early Pahlavi Modernists
and Their Society for National Heritage,” Iranian Studies 37, no. 1 (March 2004):
17–45.
18. See Kishwar Rizvi, “Art History and the Nation: Arthur Upham Pope and
the Discourse on ‘Persian Art’ in the Early Twentieth Century,” Muqarnas: Jour-
nal of Islamic Art and Architecture 24 (2007).
19. Muqarnas 8 (1990) is a special issue dedicated to the life and legacy of
K. A. C. Creswell.
20. Quoted in R. W. Hamilton, “Keppel Archibald Cameron Creswell,
1879–1974,” Proceedings of the British Academy (1974): 1–20.
21. Detailed archival information about Pope’s life is contained in Jay Gluck
and Noel Siver, eds., Surveyors of Persian Art: A Documentary Biography of Arthur
Upham Pope and Phyllis Ackerman (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 1996). See
also Arthur Upham Pope, “The Past and Future of Persian Art,” in Gluck and
Silver, Surveyors of Persian Art, 93.
22. Arthur Upham Pope and Phyllis Ackerman, A Survey of Persian Art, from
Prehistoric Times to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1938– 39).
23. The dedication to King Fu¹ad on the original 1932 manuscript of Early
Muslim Architecture, is edited out of the 1969 reprint.
24. See the discussion in Gulsum Baydar, “Toward Postcolonial Openings:
Rereading Sir Banister Fletcher’s History of Architecture,” Assemblage 35 (1998):
6–17.
25. In Tehran, the D1r al-Fun[n, or Academy of Arts and Sciences, had already
been established in 1851, but by 1861 fine arts and painting were included in the
curriculum.
26. For more on modern architecture in Turkey, see Renata Holod and
Ahmet Evin, Modern Turkish Architecture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylva-
nia Press, 1984); and Sibel Bozdovan, Modernism and Nation Building (Seattle: Uni-
versity of Washington Press, 2001).
27. For more on Qajar architecture, see Jennifer Scarce, “Ancestral Themes
in the Art of Qajar Iran, 1785–1925,” in Islamic Art in the Nineteenth Century, ed.
Doris Behrens-Abouseif and Stephen Vernoit (Leiden: Brill, 2006).
28. A case study is provided by Nasser Rabbat, “The Formation of the Neo-
Mamluk Style in Modern Egypt,” in The Education of the Architect: Historiography,
Urbanism, and the Growth of Architectural Knowledge, ed. Martha Pollak (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1997). See also Mercedes Volait, “Appropriating Orientalism?

Introduction 33
Saer Sabri’s Mamluk Revivals in Late-Nineteenth-Century Cairo,” in Islamic Art
in the Nineteenth Century: Tradition, Innovation, and Eclecticism, ed. Doris Behrens-
Abouseif and Stephen Vernoit (Leiden: Brill, 2006). The term “medieval,” in the
context of Victorian Europe and Egypt, is discussed in Paula Sanders, “The Vic-
torian Invention of Medieval Cairo: A Case Study of Medievalism and the Con-
struction of the East,” MESA Bulletin 37, no. 2 (2003): 179–98.
29. A museum was already established in the Academy of Arts and Sciences
in 1915, but it was deemed inadequate for the purposes of a national institution.
For a further introduction to Godard, see Ève Gran-Aymerich and Mina Mare-
fat, “Godard, André,” Encyclopædia Iranica Web site, www.iranica.com.
30. Well-known examples would include the Woolworth Tower (1913), Cass
Gilbert’s Gothic Revival skyscraper in New York, and McKim, Mead, and White’s
Classical Municipal Building (1915), also in New York.
31. Mina Marefat, “The Protagonists Who Shaped Modern Tehran,” in Téhéran,
capitale bicentenaire, ed. C. Adle and B. Hourcade (Paris and Tehran: Bibliothèque
Iranienne, 1992), 110.
32. For more on Jansen, Egli, and others, see Bernd Nicolai, Moderne und Exil:
Deutschsprachige Architekten in der Türkei, 1925–1955 (Berlin: Verlag für Bauwesen,
1998); as well as Sibel Bozdovan, Modernism and Nation Building.
33. When a native architectural intelligence was discovered, it was not in the
built legacy of centuries of Ottoman rule, but in the more ancient cultures of Ana-
tolia, such as the Hittites. A good example is the Anit Kabir mausoleum of Mut-
stafa Kemal Ataturk, built by Emin Onat and Orhan Arda, and completed in 1953.
34. The “outsider as insider,” as Peter Gay put it, was a common trope. The
role of German émigrés in twentieth-century cultural production generally, and
in relation to architecture, is discussed in Gay, “Weimar Culture: The Outsider as
Insider,” and William Jordy, “The Aftermath of the Bauhaus in America: Gropius,
Mies, and Breuer,” in The Intellectural Migration: Europe and America, 1930–1960,
ed. Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1969). More contemporary sources would include Talcott Parsons, Struc-
ture and Process in Modern Societies (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960); and K. W.
Deutsch, “Social Mobilization and Political Development,” American Political Sci-
ence Review 55 (September 1961): 494–95.
35. See Sibel Bozdovan, Sedad Hakki Eldem: Architect in Turkey (Singapore and
New York: Concept Media, Aperture, 1987).
36. “Architecture—Not Style,” Progressive Architecture (December 1948), 49.
37. Stephen S. Fenichell and Phillip Andrews, The United Nations: Blueprint For
Peace (Philadelphia: John C. Winston, 1951); the quotation also appears in
UNESCO. Teaching about the United Nations and the Specialized Agencies: A Selected

34 Introduction
Bibliography, Educational Studies and Documents, no. 29 (UNESCO: Paris, 1958),
31. Original members of the United Nations were Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon,
Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Turkey.
38. See also Annabel Jane Wharton, Building the Cold War: Hilton International
Hotels and Modern Architecture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
39. For some context for Western ideas of climate, see Matthias Gross,
“Human Geography and Ecological Sociology: The Unfolding of a Human Ecol-
ogy, 1890 to 1930—and Beyond,” Social Science History 28, no. 4 (2004): 575–605.
40. Discussed in Samuel Isenstadt, “‘Faith in a Better Future’: Josep Lluis Sert’s
American Embassy in Baghdad,” Journal of Architectural Education 50 (February
1997): 172–88.
41. Ellen Jawdat, “The New Architecture in Iraq,” Architectural Design 27 (March
1957): 79–80; Lord Salter [Arthur Salter], The Development of Iraq: A Plan of Action
(London: n.p., 1955), 31, 159, and passim. Both are discussed in Isenstadt, “Faith
in a Better Future.” See also Alexander Melamid, “Economic Development in the
Middle East,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 48, no. 3 (1958): 308.
42. See, e.g., Richard J. Neutra, “Regionalism in Architecture,” Plus, no. 2 (Feb-
ruary 1939): 22–23; James Stirling, “Regionalism in Modern Architecture,” Archi-
tect’s Year Book 7 (1957): 62–68; Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Native Genius in Anonymous
Architecture (New York: Horizon Press, 1957).
43. For more on Fathy, see Hassan Fathy, Gourna: A Tale of Two Villages (Cairo:
Ministry of Culture, 1969); H. Fathy, Architecture for the Poor: An Experiment in Rural
Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973); and James Steele, An Archi-
tecture for People: The Complete Works of Hassan Fathy (New York: Whitney Library
of Design, 1997). As influential as Fathy’s work was, and remains, it has been crit-
icized for its own version of orientalism. On Chadirji, see Rifat Chadirji, Concepts
and Influences: Towards a Regionalized International Architecture (New York: Rout-
ledge and Paul Kegan, 1986); and “Chairman’s Award,” in Space for Freedom: Aga
Khan Award Monograph, ed. Ismail Serageldin (London: Butterworth Architec-
ture, 1989).
44. National Research Council (U.S.), Committee on Research for the Secu-
rity of Future U.S. Embassy Buildings, The Embassy of the Future: Recommenda-
tions for the Design of Future U.S. Embassy Buildings (Washington, D.C.: National
Academy Press, 1986), 27. Since the 1970s, security has been the overwhelming
issue for embassy design.
45. Jules Langaner, “Neo-classicism? Ornamented Modern? The Quest for
Ornament in American Architecture,” Zodiac 4 (April 1959): 68– 72. On the
American Embassy program, see Ron Robin, Enclaves of America: The Rhetoric of
American Political Architecture Abroad, 1900–1965 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-

Introduction 35
sity Press, 1992); and Jane Loe›er, Architecture of Diplomacy: Building America’s
Embassies (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998).
46. “The mega-rhetoric of developmental modernization,” as Arjun Appadu-
rai put it, is crosscut synchronically by media narratives and diachronically by
the fitful implementation of actual modernization projects (see Arjun Appadu-
rai, “Here and Now,” in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization
[Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996], 9–10).
47. Mohammed Tehrani is criticized by local Iranian architects for “selling out”
to the Islamist regime. This criticism is similar to the one directed at the Turk-
ish architect Vedat Dalokay, the architect of such buildings as the mosque of Shah
Faisal in Islamabad, Pakistan (see Kishwar Rizvi, “Religious Icon and National
Symbol: The Tomb of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran,” Muqarnas 20 [2003]).
48. An interesting anthropological analysis of this site, especially in the con-
text of nationalism, is provided in M. Meeker, “Once There Was, Once There
Wasn’t: National Monuments and Interpersonal Exchange,” in Rethinking Moder-
nity and National Identity in Turkey, ed. Sibel Bozdovan and Reşat Kasaba (Seat-
tle: University of Washington Press, 1997).

36 Introduction
part i Colonial Constructions
1 Jerusalem Remade

annabel wharton

I n the nineteenth century the Old City of Jerusalem was a rich historical
mix: a Roman grid obscured by nearly two millennia of later construc-
tion. Monuments to diªerent political hegemonies survived: the Hero-
dian retaining-wall of al-Haram al-Sharif, the Constantinian and Crusader
Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Umayyad Dome of the Rock, the Mam-
luk fountains, all sheltered from a rugged landscape by the great sixteenth-
century walls of Süleyman the Magnificent and set in the sympathetic
Ottoman matrix of vernacular domestic and commercial construction in
Jerusalem stone. Before 1850, Western travelers were still able to see Jerusalem
as the ideal ancient walled city, at least from a distance. The French poet and
traveler, Alphonse de Lamartine, described the view of Jerusalem from the
Mount of Olives in October 1832:

The whole of Jerusalem is stretched before us, like the plan of a town in
relief, spread by an artist upon a table. . . . This city is not, as it has been
represented, an unshapely and confused mass of ruins and ashes, over which
a few Arab cottages are thrown, or a few Bedouin tents pitched; neither is
it, like Athens, a chaos of dust and crumbling walls, where the traveler seeks
in vain the shadow of edifices, the trace of streets, the phantom of a city;—
but it is a city shining in light and color; presenting nobly to view her intact
and battlemented walls, her blue mosque with its white colonnades, her
thousand resplendent domes, from which the rays of the autumnal sun

39
fig. 1.1. David Roberts, Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives, in The Holy Land:
Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt & Nubia, vol. 1, plate 17. This volume is in the collec-
tion of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University; museum purchase.

are reflected in a dazzling vapor; the facades of her houses, tinted by time
and heat, of the yellow and golden hue of the edifices of Paestum or of
Rome; her old towers, the guardians of her walls, to which neither one
stone, one loophole, nor one battlement is wanting; and above all, amidst
that ocean of houses, that cloud of little domes which cover them, it is a
dark elliptical dome, larger than the others, overlooked by another and a
white one. These are the churches of the Holy Sepulchre and of Calvary. . . .
The view is the most splendid that can be presented to the eye, of a city
that is no more.1

Lamartine’s rapturous image of the city was a literary convention with an

equally stereotypical visual counterpart. Western prints and paintings of
Jerusalem similarly rendered it as a mythical fortified city set in an alien wilder-
ness. Many of those renderings, despite claims of authenticity, were utterly
fanciful.2 Among the more convincing were those of the Scottish artist David
Roberts (fig. 1.1). Roberts’s master work, The Holy Land: Syria, Idumea, Arabia,
Egypt & Nubia, published in London between 1840 and 1845, was one of the
most lavish lithographic art-print collections ever manufactured; its images
were reproduced in multiple editions, both legal and pirated.3

40 Annabel Wharton
 Jerusalem was transformed during the second half of the nineteenth cen-
tury. Economic and political stability under the enlightened despot, Muham-
mad Ali, viceroy and pasha of Egypt (1805–49), as well as increasingly
aªordable travel with the extension of railroads and steamship lines, contrib-
uted to a revival of pilgrimage and the advent of tourism. Süleyman’s great
walls, built in the sixteenth century to protect Jerusalem from an anticipated
Christian Crusade, had long separated the city from a hostile hinterland; by
the end of the nineteenth century, those walls divided the Old City from its
rapidly developing suburbs. The earlier, sublime Jerusalem was, however, the
Jerusalem still sought by the city’s Western visitors. High-art representations
of the city, like Frederick Edwin Church’s Jerusalem of 1871, as well as popu-
lar renderings, like the persuasively illusionistic versions of Jerusalem on the
Day of the Crucifixion displayed in the great panoramas of the end of the nine-
teenth century, perpetuated notions of Jerusalem as an ancient walled city.4
Images also whetted the Western appetite for the Holy City.
The desire for a particular view of Jerusalem might appear benign, but it
was part of the drive for a more literal form of possession. European and
American travelers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, experienc-
ing the East under control of the Turks, willed Western domination of the
old Ottoman Empire. The travel writer Edwin de Leon gave characteristic
expression to this sentiment: “The Turcoman came as a scourge from his far
wilds, to chastise the vices of an eªete and decaying civilization. Those vices
he has aggravated and perpetuated. . . . The Turk cannot stay much longer,
nor will he make more than a feeble resistance against his expulsion.”5
Another travel writer, John Stoddard, commented, “Whether it be Russia,
Austria, Germany, England or a joint protectorate of nations, some Chris-
tian power must ere long occupy this site, and lift it to the rank designed for
it by destiny.”6
The “destiny” that de Leon predicted seemed to come to fulfillment dur-
ing World War I when, in 1917, British and allied troops under General Allenby
entered Jerusalem.7 A speech by Lord Northcliªe exemplifies the spiritual
charge of Jerusalem as Christian. The redemptive mission of restoring to the
city its true spiritual inheritance, begun by Christian Crusaders, would finally
be accomplished by Great Britain:

Jerusalem is a small city among the cities of the earth; in its great period
it was never more than chief town, almost the only town, of a small and
pastoral people: yet there is no city in the world’s history that has made a
longer or a stronger appeal to the spiritual and romantic sense of the human

Jerusalem Remade 41
 soul. . . . Jerusalem has remained the City of Cities to millions who have
never entered her gates, the capital of the ideal State, the goal of the unend-
ing pilgrimage. . . . Throughout England, as throughout Europe, genera-
tion after generation sent its sons in thousands across unknown lands and
seas, through dangers undreamed of, on the mystical quest of the Cru-
saders, eternal and unsatisfied for the Holy City of Jerusalem. . . . Jerusalem
has dominated the minds and spirits of men throughout the centuries, until
that great day . . . when it was peacefully conquered by a British Army, and
it became our privilege to restore Jerusalem and Palestine to their place
among the nations. (Cheers.)8

John H. Finley, head of the American Red Cross in Palestine at the onset of
the British occupation, even more ecstatically expressed the spiritual fervor
of the West’s delirious optimism that the British would finally put Jerusalem
right. The distant view of the Holy City is apocalyptic; the British will cleanse
the city of the cultural pollution that has dimmed its spiritual brilliance:

But even as I looked toward the place of the ancient and holy city, the gray
curtain of mist or fog parted as if drawn aside by invisible hands. A golden
rift immediately over the city— over the Church of the Holy Sepulchre
itself—slowly widened, till in a few minutes there stood as in an Apoca-
lypse before me, a city shut away from the outer city, and from all about,
as if rebuilded in the golden and jeweled image of itself. . . . This sight of
Jerusalem given to me in such a dramatic way will always remain as an
intimation of that which Americans, in common with all who are fighting
for justice in the earth, must help to bring into this Holy City. Many that
make abominations and lies in the world have entered in the past, but under
the British Government it is being cleansed, and prepared for the genius
of the nations, and especially of those whose religions found a cradle here—
Moslem, Jewish, and Christian—to adorn it, make it the most beautiful
city on the planet and give it most fit setting amid the mountains round
about it—“as the stars of a crown glistening upon his land.”9

Ronald Storrs, the British governor of the city from the beginning of the man-
date in 1917 until 1927, was perfectly suited to the job of remaking Jerusalem.
Storrs, born in Bury St. Edmunds in 1881, was the eldest son of the Reverend
John Storrs, a vicar who became Dean of Rochester. Storrs was educated at
Charterhouse and Pembroke College, Cambridge. At Cambridge he received
a first-class degree in the Classical Tripos of 1903. There he was also elected

42 Annabel Wharton
to the elite Decemviri, whose ten at his time included Charles Tennyson, J.
M. Keynes, and Lytton Strachey.10 Storrs moved directly from Cambridge into
the Egyptian Civil Service in 1904.11 In Cairo he served as Oriental Secretary
under Sir Eldon Gorst, Lord Kitchener, and Sir Henry McMahon. During the
early years of World War I, Storrs was involved with such figures as Sherif
Hussein, later King Hussein, and T. E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence
of Arabia. Lawrence described Storrs, in his Seven Pillars of Wisdom:

The first of us was Ronald Storrs, Oriental Secretary of the Residency, the
most brilliant Englishman in the Near East, and subtly e‹cient, despite
his diversion of energy in love of music and letters, of sculpture, painting,
of whatever was beautiful in the world’s fruit. None the less, Storrs sowed
what we reaped, and was always first, and the great man among us. His
shadow would have covered our work and British policy in the East like a
cloak, had he been able to deny himself the world, and to prepare his mind
and body with the sternness of an athlete for a great fight.12

As Lawrence suggests, Storrs was never willing to abstain from the arts,
whatever his military and administrative obligations. Another of Lawrence’s
anecdotes, describing their shipboard passage to Jidda to meet with Sharif
Hussein’s representative, Abdullah, to help plan the Arab Legion’s war
against the Turks, suggests something of Storrs’s sophistication:

Storrs’ intolerant brain seldom stooped to company. But today he was

more abrupt than usual. He turned twice around the decks, sniªed, “No
one worth talking to,” and sat down in one of the two comfortable arm-
chairs, to begin a discussion of Debussy with Aziz el Masri. Aziz, the Arab-
Circassian ex-colonel in the Turkish Army, now general of the Sherifian
Army, was on his way to discuss with the Emir of Mecca the equipment
and standing of the Arab regulars he was forming at Rabegh. A few min-
utes later they had left Debussy, and were depreciating Wagner: Aziz in
fluent German, and Storrs in German, French and Arabic. The ship’s
o‹cers found the whole conversation unnecessary.13

Emblematic of Storrs’s close connections with those in the arts was his inti-
mate friendship with Bernard Berenson, the well-known art connoisseur, and
his wife Mary.14 His administrative posts were always extended to include both
music and the fine arts. In Cairo he was a member of the Comité pour la
Conservation des Monuments Arabes. He was also central to the establish-

Jerusalem Remade 43
ment of the Coptic Museum in Cairo. But Storrs’s most notable contribu-
tion to the arts and to preservation was made in Jerusalem after his appoint-
ment there as governor of the city.

restitution: refusing the modern

Storrs became governor of Jerusalem on December 28, 1917, in the aftermath
of the Turkish evacuation of the city and its occupation by the British army.
He was confronted with a population that had been on starvation rations for
three years and had been left by the Turkish withdrawal entirely without pro-
visions.15 Foodstuªs and movables had been confiscated by the retreating
army. Water supplies were contaminated. Roads were impassable and the rails
of the Jaªa-Jerusalem train line had been dismantled. Despite having to address
the enormous fiscal pressures on the civil order of the city, Storrs did not
neglect his commitment to archeology and the preservation of Jerusalem.
He willed Jerusalem to remain

a city unparalleled in the world, with an appeal to the imagination that

not Rome, nor even Athens, could rival. Even in its appearance . . . there
was an impression of something strange and moving. The austere gray
walls and battlements, stone-built on hills of stone, commanded and dom-
inated the gaunt Judean plateau. Travelers . . . would pass the ancient walls,
whose stones were hewn from the quarries of Solomon, and climb the
Mount of Olives, from whose summit they could look over the city, of
which, though its towers, pinnacles, and minarets wore the work of more
recent ages, the general appearance was, and he hoped would be allowed
to remain, very much what it was 2,000 years ago.16

In order to realize his vision, within four months of the British seizure of the
city, Storrs had published in English, French, Arabic and Hebrew—all lan-
guages in which he was reasonably adept—a proclamation concerning con-
struction:

No person shall demolish, erect, alter, or repair the structure of any build-
ing in the city of Jerusalem or its environs within a radius of 2,500 metres
from the Damascus Gate (Bab al Amud) until he has obtained a written
permit from the Military Governor. Any person contravening the orders
contained in this proclamation, or any term or terms contained in a
license issued to him under this proclamation, will be liable upon convic-

44 Annabel Wharton
 tion to a fine not exceeding £E.200 [Egyptian pounds]. R. Storrs, Colonel,
Military Governor, Jerusalem, April 8th, 1918.17

Another decree of about the same time prohibited the use of stucco and cor-
rugated iron within the city walls. Red tiles were also forbidden.18 The ban-
ning of stucco, corrugated iron, and red tiles stood at the core of Storrs’s
commitment to the local and historic and his opposition to the modern and
Western. Stucco and iron were suspect as imported technologies; red tiles
were mistrusted on ideological grounds. Red roof tiles were then and remain
politically loaded indices of an alien European presence in Palestine. As Arthur
Ruppin, a Zionist administrator of the Jewish National Fund, reported to the
Jewish Colonization Society of Vienna in 1908, “In contrast with the pitiful
Arab villages, with their huts of baked clay, the Jewish colonies, with their
wide streets, their strong stone houses and their red-tiled roofs, look like ver-
itable oases of culture.”19 The continued ideological power of “red roofs” is
indicated by the use of that epithet in the political struggles over Jewish set-
tlements in the occupied territories.20 For Storrs, Jerusalem was no place for
red tiles. He mandated the use of Jerusalem stone; the tradition of stone vault-
ing was maintained, thus salvaging “the heritage in Jerusalem of an imme-
morial and a hallowed past.”21
Storrs’s opposition to the modern went beyond current construction tech-
nologies: “Replying to a request for a tram line (from Jerusalem) to Bethle-
hem, I said that the first rail laid would be laid over the dead body of the
Military Governor. The cars did seem so wholly out of keeping with the sur-
roundings that I forbade them throughout the province of Judea.”22 Adver-
tising, except minimally on shop fronts, was also proscribed: “Stricter measures
are being enforced for the preservation of the traditional building style of
Jerusalem, oªensive and unsuitable materials are being prohibited or removed,
and an eªective control of new buildings and town planning sections has been
instituted. The size of shop signs, which had become of recent years a seri-
ous disfigurement to the city, has been regulated by Municipal By-laws, under
which also the posting of bills, placards, and advertisements is restricted to
moderate-sized notice boards displayed in specially chosen localities.”23 Storrs
also closed bars within his jurisdiction that served alcoholic beverages.

restitution: retrieving the ancient

Not allowing the introduction of the modern was part of Storrs’s strategy
for producing old Jerusalem; restoring the city was a second component. The

Jerusalem Remade 45
vehicle for Storrs’s project of remaking was the Pro-Jerusalem Society. Storrs
established the Pro-Jerusalem Society as an independent, non-governmental
association of distinguished representatives of the various ethnic communi-
ties in the city. Members included the Grand Mufti, the most powerful reli-
gious representative of the Muslim community; the mayor of Jerusalem; the
Orthodox Patriarch; the Latin Patriarch; the head of the Armenian Convent
in Jerusalem; the Custode di Terra Santa; and the head of the Jewish com-
munity. Storrs served on the committee for the duration of its eight years
of existence. As Secretary to this Society, as well as Civic Advisor, Storrs
appointed C. R. Ashbee, a friend and follower of William Morris and a com-
mitted Arts and Crafts advocate.24 In a city tense with ethnic and religious
hostility, project decisions made within this group might escape charges of
preference or prejudice. Indeed, this committee, made up of individuals whose
only shared commitment was to the physical well-being of the city, seems to
have been the one setting in which representatives of the diªerent factions
regularly worked productively together. Ashbee described the British project
in a press interview:

“There is the old Jerusalem, the city within the walls, to preserve,” he said,
“and there is the growth and development of the new city to regulate. All
the work is under the control of Sir Arthur Money, the head of the Occu-
pied Enemy Territories Administration, and it is the special charge of Gen-
eral Ronald Storrs, the Governor of Jerusalem. A number of us are busy
on diªerent branches of the work. Mr. Ernest Richmond, for instance, is
Director-General of Public Monuments; Mr. Maclean is in charge of town-
planning in the new city; and Dr. Betts has come from Egypt to help in
the work of the municipality. We have to deal with the consequences of
the years of Turkish misrule and with the results of the bitter jealousies
of the nations. Where there has not been actual ill-treatment of the build-
ings there has been neglect. At the same time, we have to work very ten-
derly and carefully. Do not think of that alarming word ‘restoration’ in
connection with what we are doing. Our aim is rather to discover and pre-
serve all that remains of the past and to undo so far as we can the evil that
has been done. We are getting ready, for instance, to fill up the gap that
was made in the wall to enable the Kaiser to make his triumphal entry into
Jerusalem, and the terrible clock-tower that was put up to celebrate that
event will be pulled down. And we have to get rid of the jealousies of the
nations. During the past fifteen or twenty years the peoples of the earth
seem to have chosen Jerusalem as the right place to advertise their bitter-

46 Annabel Wharton
 est and their most extreme discrimination. Moslems, Jews, Armenians,
Greeks, Latins—all these took a bit of Jerusalem and put a wall round it
to keep oª all the others. The Germans, of course, got possession of the
best military position they could find, and practically fortified it. We
English, for our part, put up a bad imitation of an Oxford College. Well,
we want to get all these bits out of their prisons and to set them free. . . .
In conclusion, you must remember that what we are doing in Jerusalem
is being done not for any one nation, but for all the world. For, after all, it
belongs to the world.”25

Restoration is, however, expensive. The public funds available to Storrs for
the improvements that he sought to make were extremely limited. The British
Empire was not a charity. The “Cromer System” of colonial order was
designed to produce wealth rather than give it away. As Gideon Bigger
described it, the “Cromer System”

emphasized the importance of low taxation, e‹cient fiscal administration,

careful expenditure on remunerative public work, and a minimal interfer-
ence in the internal and external tra‹c of goods (of colonial territories).
This system was most eªective in countries with a clear-cut native ruling
class. . . . Development programs and services in the colonies were funded
by local tax revenues, British government loans, and public or private invest-
ment. . . . Since tax revenues were much lower than in Britain, the services
provided in the colonies were obviously more limited.26

The British government was unwilling to divert its resources to Palestine.

Indeed, as the British exacted loads on the province’s revenue, not even all
local income was devoted to local infrastructure. Notably, the British treas-
ury insisted that Palestine contribute to the repayment of the Ottoman debt,
which of course involved British creditors. Further, concessions granted by
the Ottomans before the war were deemed valid after it. Standard Oil had a
concession for oil development; a French company for the operation of var-
ious railroads and cargo and passenger ships; and there were also foreign
monopolies on water and power and tobacco growing. Finally, the British
government refused to guarantee a loan that was repeatedly requested by
Herbert Samuel, the first High Commissioner of Palestine because Palestine
was never intended to be part of the Empire. The British were willing to pay
only for military expenditures—and when they proved too costly, in 1948,
they withdrew.27

Jerusalem Remade 47
 Storrs finally extracted an annual subsidy of between £500 and £2,000 from
Samuel, through the threat of a tourist tax.28 All other monies had to be raised
privately. His trip to the United States in 1923—designed to exploit connec-
tions to the very wealthy—represents his most notable eªort in fundraising.
The Pro-Palestine Society’s yearbooks, which provide the most useful doc-
umentation of its activities, were actually published by Ashbee and privately
circulated as part of Storrs’s fundraising eªorts. In his autobiography, he
describes himself as a well-practiced beggar:

Many of the leading merchants, realizing how greatly the future pros-
perity of Jerusalem depended upon its preservation as Jerusalem (and not
an inferior Kiev, Manchester or Baltimore), subscribed liberally to our
funds; and in Egypt, England and America, Moslems, Christians and Jews,
suspicious of any creed, culture or policy other than their own, gave gladly
to a Jerusalem which represented all three. I realized then the power of
the name of Jerusalem; I realized it even more afterwards when appeal-
ing for other countries or causes; I became, I am happy to believe, a con-
vincing and successful Schnorrer (Yiddish for professional beggar). My
subscription list, of cheques ranging from £3 to £600, included from Cairo
the names of Smouha and Btesh, the Syrian Community, and the editor
of the Mokattam; in Jerusalem the Anglo-Egyptian Bank, Sir Abbas
Eªendi Abd al-Bahá, the Mufti, several Jewish firms, the Imperial Otto-
man Bank, the Crédit Lyonnais, the Anglo-Palestine Bank, the Banco di
Roma, the 51st Sikh Regiment, the Zionist Commission, the Municipality,
and the Administration; in Europe and America, Lord Milner, Sir Basil
Zaharoª, Lord Northcliªe, Sir Alred Mond, Mrs. Holman Hunt, Mrs. Car-
negie, Messrs Pierpont Morgan, and Messrs Keun Loeb. I found institu-
tions more generous than individuals, and (especially in America) men
than women.29

Storrs also requested financial support for the Pro-Jerusalem Society from
King George V, but was sharply rebuªed for his impertinence.30 Despite lim-
ited funds, during the first years of British occupation a number of impor-
tant repairs were made to the fabric of Jerusalem under the aegis of the
Pro-Jerusalem Society.31 The Dome of the Rock, the architectural icon of the
city, received desperately needed attention:

The supervision of this important work has been since the outset in the
hands of Mr. Ernest Richmond, the advisor architect of the Wakf, from

48 Annabel Wharton
fig. 1.2. Ceramic street sign, Mandate period, now in the Christian Information Center
at Jaªa Gate. Author’s photograph.

whose report of March 1919 the following extract is given: “To ensure com-
plete immunity from decay, especially in the case of the more modern
tiles, is impossible. The surface of this kind of tile . . . is bound to disap-
pear much sooner than that of the earlier tiles, thereby seriously increas-
ing the denuded areas. . . . Is the method adopted in the sixteenth century
of decorating the outer walls of this building with glazed tiles to be con-
tinued . . . or abandoned? . . . All skin decays, but so long as there is life
in the body which it covers its tissues are continually renewed. So long as
the Dome of the Rock remains a live building—a building that is to say
which is an integral part in the life that surrounds it—so long as it fulfils
the functions it has fulfilled for 1,200 years, so long must its skin be con-
tinually renewed.”32

The medieval kilns were restored and tile makers brought from Turkey to
provide the high-quality tiles essential to a credible restoration of the struc-
ture.33 Those tile makers also produced beautiful street signs for the city that
have since been replaced (see figs. 1.2 and 1.3).
The Dome of the Rock is the most familiar sign of Jerusalem, but its Islamic
identity makes it an ambiguous one for Western viewers. Even in the descrip-
tions of the city quoted above, the Dome of the Rock’s prominence is oddly
elided. The religious a‹liations of the walls of the city are, in contrast, illeg-

Jerusalem Remade 49
fig. 1.3. Ceramic street sign, Jewish Quarter, 2005. Author’s photograph.

ible. Their Ottoman origins were ignored; they were represented as time-
less. Fisher Howe, an evangelical amateur archaeologist writing in the mid-
nineteenth century, for example, described the walls as unchanged by time:
“Our first impressions on walking about Jerusalem were an agreeable disap-
pointment to find it, as compared with other eastern cities, so well built, and
surrounded with walls and battlements so imposing. . . . Its ancient topograph-
ical features are marked and mainly unchanged.”34 The British eªort to repair
the wall made this reading of the walls as transparently ancient even easier.
The walls’ Turkish associations were purged.35 The Turkish fortress, guard-

50 Annabel Wharton
rooms, and o‹ces of the Citadel were cleared away. Storrs oversaw the elim-
ination of encumbrances from the walls themselves and from the sentry walk
at their summit, which was subsequently opened to tourists. Guardhouses at
the gates, functioning in their decrepit state as hovels for the dispossessed,
or, in one case, as a latrine, were demolished or redeemed. The great gates
into the city—Damascus Gate, St. Stephen’s Gate, Herod’s Gate, and Jaªa
Gate—were also restored.
Storrs also supervised the elimination of the more modern reminders of
Jerusalem’s connection to Britain’s Axis enemies: “The clock tower erected
by the loyal burgesses of Jerusalem, in a style midway between that of the
Eddystone lighthouse and a jubilee memorial to commemorate the thirty-
third year of the auspicious reign of the late Sultan Abdul Hamid, has been
bodily removed from the north side of the Jaªa Gate, which it too long dis-
figured”36 (see fig. 1.4). As described in the popular press,

The famous Clock Tower at the Jaªa Gate, in Jerusalem, has been taken
down on the grounds that it was ugly and not in keeping with the ancient
wall. It was put up in 1907, and boasted of a fine timepiece, giving both
European and Arabic times. . . . The tower was removed at the instigation
of the Pro-Jerusalem Society, which was founded by Sir Ronald Storrs, the
Present Governor of the Holy City, some eighteen months ago, and whose
object is “to preserve the ancient monuments, encourage technical edu-
cation, plant trees, and in general beautify the ancient and historic city of
Jerusalem.”37

The breach in the wall at the Jaªa Gate, opened for Kaiser Wilhelm II’s tri-
umphal visit to Jerusalem in 1898, was also repaired.
Restoration of the walls of the city was not enough. Those walls also had
to be framed so that they might be properly seen. In addition to forbidding
the construction of the new and promoting the reconstruction of the old,
Storrs sought to re-create the view of Jerusalem as isolated in the landscape.
Patrick Geddes, the well-known Scottish town planner, embraced Storrs’s
project in his report on the expansion Jerusalem. He proposed that Jerusalem’s
ancient ruggedness be re-created:

On the east side of the Valley there is too little soil . . . while on the oppo-
site side of the old City of David, the Tyropean Valley and the slope of the
Christian Zion are all buried deep under the accumulated rubbish of cen-
turies, the present gardens being thus many feet above the normal surface

Jerusalem Remade 51
 fig. 1.4. Jerusalem, Jaªa Gate with the Turkish
clock tower, and Jaªa Gate after its removal. The
Graphic, April 19, 1924, 577.

of historic times. . . . It would be an easy matter to remove this earth and

rubbish further downhill, and lay it on both sides of the valley below Siloah,
with large new garden terraces. . . . In this way may be laid out and kept
permanently open the early biblical Jerusalem, of which the present old
City is but a later development. . . . On the economic gain to Jerusalem as
a pilgrim and tourist city by this operation I need not expatiate. It is obvi-
ous that its attractions would be increased.38

Geddes’s reference to the (Western) pilgrim suggests his focal interest in

Jerusalem as a view. Elsewhere in the same document he is explicit: “No symp-
tom of the modern decay of Jerusalem can be more serious than the recent
and continued filling up of the fosse of the castle with concealment of its
impressive slope of wall. . . . [An eªort should be made] to restore this valley
to its normal [sic] park condition. The whole will then particularly correspond
to that of the central panorama of Edinburgh, with its Valley Gardens and
Castle above.”39 A green zone around the city was mandated: the suburbs were
to be separated from the city by parklands. The disciplined space of a garden
city was designed to contrast with the undisciplined, nomadic setting of the
nostalgically desired medieval town.40 Appropriately, Geddes named Jerusalem
“the most extensive Sacred Park in the world.”41 A photograph of Jaªa Gate
juxtaposed to Ashbee’s drawing of how the same scene should appear per-
fectly represents Storrs’s vision of Jerusalem (see fig. 1.5).

52 Annabel Wharton
fig. 1.5. Plates 44 and 45 (1921), as they appeared in Pro-Jerusalem Society Council,
Jerusalem, 1918–1920. The drawing is by C. R. Ashbee.

effort and effect

Storrs worked to realize a vision of Jerusalem not unlike that described by
John Finley. The New York Globe quoted Storrs: “We must preserve the char-
acter of the Holy City. The repose of its sacred sites, the colorful beauty of
its vaulted streets, must not be disturbed. The sentiment that brings thousands
of pilgrims here is our trust, the force by which Jerusalem attracts the hom-
age of the whole world. We can have a sound and yet an ancient city.”42 Ash-
bee articulated the task set by Storrs for the Pro-Jerusalem Society:

The disaster of the Great War has forced upon all men and women the neces-
sity of preserving all that is possible of the beauty and purpose, in actual

Jerusalem Remade 53
 form, of the civilizations that have passed before. We have come to see, more-
over, that this is not a mere matter of archaeology or the protection of
ancient buildings. In the blind mechanical order with which we are threat-
ened everything that we associate with our sense of beauty is alike in dan-
ger. Landscape, the unities of streets and sites, the embodied vision of the
men that set the great whole together, the sense of color which in any ori-
ental city is still a living sense—all these things have to be considered prac-
tically; they must, to put it plainly, be protected against the incursions of
the grasping trader, the ignorant workman, the self-interested property
owner, the well-intentioned Government Department. In Jerusalem, per-
haps more than in any other city, these facts are brought home to us.43

In July 1918, Storrs wrote to his mother, “I only regret that I was not here 50
years ago when Jerusalem would have been in practice, as it is in eªect, an
absolutely unique City in the world surrounded by its medieval walls (which
are quite perfect) and without houses or monasteries concealing any part of
them.”44
The Western popular press embraced Storrs’s mission—that is, that the
means of renewing Jerusalem lay not only in revealing its antiquity, but also
in eliminating its modernity. The Aberdeen Free Press reported:

The only “new Jerusalem” is the old one. The gray, austere, ancient, rock-
built Palestinian capital, which has for ages appealed to the imagination of
the world as no other city has done, . . . is experiencing the greatest trans-
formation it has undergone since its destruction by Titus. . . . It is gratify-
ing to find that the British Administration is setting its face against forms
of modernization which would interfere with the traditional appearance
of the city, and, if it had its way, would macadamize Gethsemane and rebuild
Solomon’s Temple with corrugated iron.45

Storrs salvaged the old Jerusalem and opposed the external modernization of
the new Jerusalem for a purpose. His object was not intentionally the histori-
cal packaging of Jerusalem for sale to tourists. It might, of course, be argued
that British Jerusalem was a precursor of the familiar Italian urban shopping
mall, the centro storico, an invention of the 1960s.46 It could equally be repre-
sented as a prototype for Colonial Williamsburg, America’s most successful
construction of history for the market, or even as a distant antecedent of Cel-
ebration, the pseudo–New England 1930s town reconstructed in Orlando as a
theme park for daily living. But Storrs did not plan Jerusalem as a means of

54 Annabel Wharton
putting history to commercial use. His strategy for the city was less venal, but
in the end, more dangerous. Jerusalem was intended to serve as an appropri-
ate vessel of aesthetic or religious experience. His commitment to the aestheti-
cization of Jerusalem is apparent from his diary entry of December 25, 1917:

So far as I can recall them, my impressions, though aesthetically and archi-

tecturally better founded, resume what we felt seven years ago: firstly, that
the faking of the sites and the indignity with which even when authentic
they are now mispresented, is an irritation, an imposition, and an aªront
to the intelligence; secondly, that the pathos, grandeur and nobility of the
ancient City of the Heart easily countervails these very real annoyances:

“How beautiful, if sorrow had not made

Sorrow more beautiful than beauty’s self.”
Aesthetic death is swallowed up in spiritual victory.47

For Storrs, Jerusalem transcended time and existed outside history:48 “not
the hopeless beauty of Venice, the embalmed majesty of Thebes, the aban-
don of Ferrara, or the melancholy of Ravenna; but some past yet unalloyed
and throbbing, that seems to confound ancient and modern, and to undate
recorded history.”49
The apparent historical transcendence of Jerusalem—a transcendence to
which Storrs fundamentally contributed—provided no resistance to the
observer’s desire to see in it the material proof of a particular religious past.
Like its walls, most of the vernacular buildings in the Old City date from
the period of Ottoman rule or later, but the ramparts, streets, buildings, and
gardens are still treated by travelers from the West as surviving witnesses to
the city’s remote and sacred past. In 2006, Discovery Ministries advertised
its tours of the Holy Land as a return to Jesus’s Jerusalem: “Join us as we
travel to the land of the Bible and share a life-changing spiritual journey. You
will walk where Jesus walked, and experience Bible teaching. . . . Make this a
Trip of a Lifetime!”50
Storrs was not a Christian pilgrim. Although his conception of Jerusalem
was deeply informed by his own spiritual idealization of the city and its ide-
alized Western images, he did not have to impose on the city a particularly
Christian form. Rather, Storrs confirmed the city’s metaphysical aªect by con-
solidating its antiquity and denying its present. He treated the city as the
embodiment of the peculiarly Western, Hegelian notion of religion and art
as elevated above life. Jerusalem, thus preserved, was confirmed as the

Jerusalem Remade 55
authorization of ominously tendentious religious anxieties and historical
claims, as Daniel Monk has demonstrated.51
Storrs assumed that his own obsession with Jerusalem as the physical
embodiment of a transcendent history was shared by the contentious pop-
ulation he governed. He supposed that a common concern with the preser-
vation of their city would establish a communal ground for the belligerent
ethnic groups of Jerusalem—Arabs, Christians, and Jews. His expectations
were frustrated. All parties involved cared passionately for Jerusalem, but their
Jerusalems were not the same. Most particularly, the historical Jerusalem that
Storrs imagined and struggled with some success to realize was not the city
as it had become for Muslims, Jews, and Orthodox Christians by the early
twentieth century.
Storrs’s governorship of Jerusalem and the work of the Pro-Jerusalem Soci-
ety collapsed under the pressure of rising ethnic and religious antagonisms
in 1927. The optimism with which many in the West had viewed the British
control of Palestine at the occupation’s origins was unfounded. The inter-
ests of the various factions engaged in Palestine proved irreconcilable. The
Mandate government’s attempt to create a peaceful multiethnic state failed;
Storrs’s attempt to produce ancient Jerusalem was, in contrast, perhaps too
successful. Storrs’s presentation of Jerusalem and its buildings as aesthetic
and authentic, above the ideological and political, allows them to do danger-
ous ideological and political work. His eªort to re-create the ancient city, for
example, could be understood as authorizing tendentious plans for further
projects of restoration—namely, the reconstruction the Jewish Temple on the
site of the Dome of the Rock. The apparently benign Western spirituality of
British Mandate o‹cials has been displaced by the truly dangerous religios-
ity of Jewish and Christian evangelical extremists who seek the destruction
of the Islamic other as essential to their own apocalyptic redemption.

notes

I am indebted to Kishwar Rizvi and Sandy Isenstadt for inviting me to participate

in the Conference on the West in the East, held at Yale University in April 2003.
The research and argument developed for this paper was subsequently used in
my book, Selling Jerusalem (University of Chicago Press, 2006). A grant from the
Graham Foundation and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Soci-
eties and the National Humanities Center supported the work and writing

56 Annabel Wharton
involved in this project. I would also like to thank Professors Kalman Bland and
Bernard Wasserstein for their critical readings of this essay.
1. Alphonse de Lamartine, A Pilgrimage to the Holy Land Comprising Recollec-
tions, Sketches and Reflections Made During a Tour in the East, 2 vols. (New York: D.
Appleton and Co., 1848), 1:267–68.
2. See, e.g., William Finden, Edward Francis Finden, and Thomas Hartwell
Horne, Landscape Illustrations of the Bible: Consisting of Views of the Most Remark-
able Places Mentioned in the Old and New Testaments, From Original Sketches Taken
on the Spot (London: John Murray, 1836), fig. 3. A pretend image of Jerusalem,
like that in Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of the Christ, is, even now, more con-
vincing than the real thing.
3. For Roberts and for bibliographies of earlier studies, see Kenneth Paul
Bendiner, “David Roberts in the Near East: Social and Religious Themes,” Art
History 6, no. 1 (1983): 67–81. For reproductions of the entire set, see Michael P.
Mezzatesta, ed., Jerusalem and the Holy Land Rediscovered: The Prints of David Roberts
(1796–1846) (Durham, NC: Duke University Museum of Art, 1996).
4. Annabel Jane Wharton, Selling Jerusalem (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2006), 162ª.
5. Edwin de Leon, Thirty Years of My Life on Three Continents, 2 vols. (Lon-
don: Ward and Downey, 1890), 2:141–42.
6. This comment was inspired by Constantinople, but might also be applied
to Jerusalem (see John L. Stoddard, John L. Stoddard’s Lectures, vol. 2, Constantino-
ple, Jerusalem, Egypt [Boston: Balch Brothers, 1897], 108).
7. For a general sense of the British relationship to Palestine, see Barbara
W. Tuchman, Bible and Sword (New York: New York University Press, 1956). For
a balanced history of the British governance of Palestine between 1917 and 1928,
see Bernard Wasserstein, The British in Palestine, 2d ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1991).
8. Northcliªe greeting to the governor of Jerusalem at a joint meeting in
London of the Overseas Club and Patriotic League. Northcliªe was ill on the
occasion; his speech was read in his absence. See Times (London), December 30,
1920.
9. John H. Finley, A Pilgrim in Palestine: Being an Account of Journeys on Foot by
the First American Pilgrim after General Allenby’s Recovery of the Holy Land (New York:
Scribner, 1919), 60–62.
10. Ronald Storrs, Orientations (London: Nicholson and Watson, 1937), 15.
11. Ibid., chaps. 2–12. A summary of Storrs’s Egyptian service is provided in
“Colonel R. Storrs, C.M.G.,” The Sphinx, February 23, 1918, 164.

Jerusalem Remade 57
 12. T. E. (Thomas Edward) Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1935; repr., Gar-
den City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966), 30.
13. Ibid.
14. The Berensons acted as liaisons in Storrs’s unsuccessful courtship of
wealthy American Margaret Strong, the only daughter of Bessie and Charles A.
Strong and granddaughter of J. D. Rockefeller (see “The Papers of Sir Ronald
Storrs [1881–1956] from Pembroke College, Cambridge,” box 3, folder 3, Jerusalem,
1922.
15. For an overview of the economic history of Jerusalem, see Alfred E. Lieber,
“An Economic History of Jerusalem,” in Jerusalem: City of the Ages, ed. Alice L.
Eckhardt (New York: University Press of America, 1987).
16. Ronald Storrs speech to the Overseas Club and Patriotic League, Times
(London), December 30, 1920.
17. Ronald Storrs, preface to Jerusalem, 1918–1920, ed. Charles Robert Ashbee
(London: John Murray, for the Council of the Pro-Jerusalem Society, 1921), iv.
18. Ashbee, Jerusalem, 1918–1920, 37– 38.
19. From Arthur Ruppin’s address, delivered on February 27, 1908. Published
as “The Picture in 1907,” in Arthur Ruppin, Three Decades of Palestine ( Jerusalem:
Schocken, 1936), 9.
20. For an ideological assessment of “red roofs,” see Daniel Bertrand Monk,
review of Bauhaus on the Carmel and the Crossroads of Empire, by Gilbert Herbert
and Silvina Sosnovsky, AA Files 28 (1994): 94–99. This article begins with Shim’on
Peres’s 1991 attack on Itzhak Shamir’s Likud government and Jewish settlements
on the West Bank through reference to their “red roofs.”
21. See Storrs, preface to Ashbee, Jerusalem, 1918–1920, vi.
22. Evening Standard (London), December 21, 1920.
23. Storrs, preface to Ashbee, Jerusalem, 1918–1920, iv.
24. Charles Robert Ashbee, A Palestine Notebook, 1918–1923 (Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday, 1923); Inbal Ben-Asher Gitler, “C. R. Ashbee’s Jerusalem Years: Arts
and Crafts, Orientalism, and British Regionalism,” Assaph: Studies in Art History
5 (2000): 29–52; Alan Crawford, C. R. Ashbee: Architect, Designer, and Romantic Social-
ist (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985).
25. Newspaper clipping from the Observer (London), dated 1919, in “The
Papers of Sir Ronald Storrs,” Box 3, Folder 1, 1919.
26. Biger, An Empire in the Holy Land, 20–21.
27. Ibid., 94–95.
28. “The Papers of Sir Ronald Storrs (1881–1956) from Pembroke College,
Cambridge,” box 3, folder 2: Jerusalem, 1920–21.
29. Storrs, Orientations, 364–65.

58 Annabel Wharton
 30. A letter from J. A. C. Dilley to Sir Herbert Samuel, dated August 30, 1920,
indicates that Storrs’s request to the king for the patronage of the Pro-Jerusalem
Society was an “irregularity”: “His Majesty does not as a rule give his patronage
to new undertakings until they have become firmly established, both financially
and otherwise, and he very rightly points out that such a communication should
have reached him through you and through this Department” (Storrs, “The Papers
of Sir Ronald Storrs,” box 3, folder 2, 1920–1921).
31. An idea of the complexity involved in disbursing monies is conveyed by
a letter from Ashbee to Storrs, dated December 4, 1920 (ibid.).
32. Ashbee, A Palestine Notebook, 9.
33. Pro-Jerusalem Society, Council, Jerusalem, 1920–1922; being the records
of the Pro-Jerusalem council during the first two years of the civil administra-
tion, edited by the Council of the Pro-Jerusalem Society by C. R. Ashbee . . . with
a Preface by Sir Ronald Storrs (London: J. Murray, for the Council of the Pro-
Jerusalem Society, 1924), 32.
34. Howe also noted with satisfaction that “[the walls] aªord an ample pro-
tection against assaults from the Arab tribes, but would be no obstruction to Euro-
pean arms and modern engines of war” (Fisher Howe, Oriental and Sacred Scenes
[New York: M. W. Dodd, 1854], 246–48).
35. The moat was cleaned. The Turks had used the southern and eastern parts
of the fosse as a dump; they had planned to fill its western section to serve as a
roadbed and building site. It was suggested that the Turks had also intended to
sell the ancient ramparts. Supposedly, the walls were to be leveled, with the fosse
as a means of providing new construction space. This proposal was later repeated
by David Ben-Gurion, who “called for ‘the demolition of the walls of Jerusalem
because they are not Jewish’ ” (see Meron Benvenisti, City of Stone [Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1966], 136).
36. Storrs, preface to Ashbee, Jerusalem, 1918–1920, vi.
37. Harold J. Shepstone, “Restoring the Walls of Jerusalem,” The Graphic, April
19, 1924.
38. Patrick Geddes, “Jerusalem Actual and Possible: A Preliminary Report to
the Chief Administrator of Palestine and the Military Governor of Jerusalem on
Town Planning and Improvements,” file Z4/10.202 (1919), 18–19, Central Zionist
Archives, Jerusalem.
39. Ibid., 11–12.
40. Jerusalem oªers a perfect site for reading Deleuze’s agonistic relation of
smooth and striated spaces; see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987),
474–500.

Jerusalem Remade 59
 41. See Geddes, “Jerusalem Actual and Possible..
42. “Jerusalem Now Basks in Rule That Is Tactful,” New York Globe, March 12,
1919.
43. Pro-Jerusalem Society, Council, Jerusalem, 1920–1922, 4.
44. “The Papers of Sir Ronald Storrs (1881–1956) from Pembroke College,
Cambridge,” box 3, folder 1, Jerusalem, 1919.
45. “Jerusalem Transformed,” Aberdeen Free Press, December 24, 1920.
46. See Roberto Maria Dainotto, “The Gubbio Papers: Historic Centers in
the Age of the Economic Miracle,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 8, no. 1 (2003):
67–83.
47. Storrs, Orientations, 333.
48. Storrs had great disdain for those who were not able to experience the
city’s transcendental qualities: “Many were ‘disappointed with Jerusalem’ because
‘it was so diªerent to what they had expected.’ The roads were even worse than
the hotels and in place of the Holy City they found—a smell” (ibid., 361).
49. Ibid., 327.
50. Discovery Ministries, Inc., Web site, Prophecy Tours and Cruises, www
.discoveryministries.com/ministry/israeltour.php (accessed March 19, 2006)
(emphasis added).
51. Daniel Bertrand Monk, An Aesthetic Occupation (Durham, N.C.: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2002).

60 Annabel Wharton
2 Modern Architecture, Preservation,
and the Discourse on Local Culture
in Italian Colonial Libya
brian l. m c laren

T his essay examines the discourse on local culture in Italian colonial

Libya and the related use of indigenous building forms by architects
working in the region. During the course of the 1930s two distinct
approaches to the appropriation of local forms emerged in architectural dis-
course. The earliest of these tendencies, which began with the work and writ-
ings of Carlo Enrico Rava, was a quintessentially modernist one that oªered
an abstract assimilation of native forms and typologies. In the latter part of
the 1930s, architects like Florestano Di Fausto evinced the material qualities
of indigenous buildings in projects that called for their direct reenactment.
The full significance of this second means of appropriation—which has all
the appearance of a regionalist practice—reaches well beyond the formal or
linguistic dimensions of architecture. The racially motivated understanding
of Libyan culture that dominated Italian colonial politics in the late 1930s—
an understanding that was largely borrowed from scientific disciplines like
anthropology—was in this case being applied to architecture.
Any apparent conflict between modernist and regionalist appropriations
of indigenous forms, however, does not arise from an opposition between
modernity and tradition. When looking at the Italian presence in Libya, it is
quite clear that both of these terms—“the modern” and “the traditional”—
were entirely constructed by the colonial authorities. In the first case, Libya
was regarded as Italy’s “fourth shore”—that is, as an extension of Italian soil
on the southern shore of the Mediterranean. Indeed, one major component

61
of Italian colonial politics was the incorporation of Libya into the metropole
through, among other things, the creation of a modern system of roads and
public institutions. In the second, under the auspices of an “indigenous pol-
itics,” Libyan traditions were the subject of a highly operative preservation
program that established their status as primitive and backward in relation
to the West—a political strategy that implicitly justified Italy’s position as a
colonizing nation. The contrast between these political strategies is a reflec-
tion of the ambivalence of colonial discourse—an ambivalence in which
Homi Bhabha argues the colonizer and colonized are not dialectically
opposed, but rather linked in a relationship of repetition and diªerence.1

modern architecture and indigenous politics

The use of native forms by Italian architects in Libya was a relatively direct
result of the political policies developed by the colonial authorities to deal
with the local populations. Although these indigenous politics were employed
beginning with the first Italian occupation in 1911, they were given a more
precise direction by Governor Giuseppe Volpi (1921–25), who also initiated
a program to improve the colony’s agricultural economy.2 Among the preser-
vation policies was a program directed at the conservation of the Roman,
Arab, and Ottoman historical patrimony, which had the aim of appeasing the
local populations. This program began in 1921 with the creation of a commis-
sion to identify buildings of historic interest and supervise their restoration.
This list eventually included two Roman monuments, the ancient castle and
walls of Tripoli; thirteen Muslim religious buildings; and twenty-four private
residences. The commitment of the Volpi administration to this program was
demonstrated through legislative measures introduced in early 1922 that
extended government regulations to cover the restoration of the Islamic her-
itage of Libya, and established a list of buildings to be conserved.3
One of the most important areas in which the Volpi administration inter-
vened in Libyan culture was the local artisanal industries. The Government
O‹ce of Indigenous Applied Arts was founded in January 1925 to study these
industries and make proposals for their improvement.4 A major focus of this
o‹ce was the production of local craftsmen, who were seen to be practic-
ing an “unclear and impure” interpretation of Arab art. As a consequence,
master craftsmen were brought in from the French colonies of Algeria,
Tunisia, and Morocco in order to assist the local workers to develop “more
perfect techniques.”5 It should be noted, however, that these new methods
were a return to practices that corresponded with the Italian view of what

62 Brian L. McLaren
was authentic. Moreover, at the same time, this o‹ce was active in improv-
ing the productivity of the indigenous craft industries. These initiatives
included participating in fairs and exhibitions, such as the permanent display
in Corso Vittorio Emanuele III in Tripoli. This presentation had the appear-
ance of an Arabized version of a metropolitan storefront—a perfect expres-
sion of the interaction between modernization and preservation that marked
the Italian intervention into the indigenous culture of Libya (see fig. 2.1).
It is important to recognize that Italian interest in the local culture of Libya
was profoundly shaped by a parallel research program that emerged much
earlier in the French colonies in North Africa. In addition to the cultural nation-
alism of the “civilizing mission” that was carried out in Algeria, Tunisia, and
Morocco, the French colonial authorities initiated educational and research
programs related to the indigenous language and culture. One of the lead-
ing experts on the Muslim arts of North Africa was Prosper Ricard, who pub-
lished numerous essays and books on the subject.6 Among Ricard’s most
significant collaborations was his work with Hachette publishers, the Paris-
based company that produced tourist-oriented books. The most widely dis-
seminated of these works, Pour comprendre l’art musulman dans l’Afrique du Nord
et en Espagne (1924), catalogs Muslim arts according to a taxonomic system.
The importance of this publication to the Italian discourse on indigenous cul-
ture lies in the fact that Ricard provided arguments about the Roman origins
of North African culture that would later be taken up by Italian architects
and scholars.7
The research of Prosper Ricard had an even more direct impact on the
interpretation of Libyan culture. While he was director of indigenous arts
in Morocco, Ricard was hired by Giuseppe Volpi to study the artisanal indus-
tries of Tripolitania. The results of this project were published in two works
in 1926, an essay and a book, in which Ricard surveyed a range of artistic pro-
ductions, including architecture, decoration, and regional craft traditions.8
In the essay, Ricard called for a program of modernization that involved the
systematic study of native practices for the purposes of improving their pro-
ductivity and quality, at the same time that it recommended a return to more
ancient, and thus more authentic, techniques.9 Notably, Ricard’s interest in
the Berbers, a group that held a great attraction for the Italians as a “primi-
tive” society whose culture preceded the Arab invasion of North Africa, can
be understood as a not so subtle validation of the argument that Libyan cul-
ture was built upon Roman foundations.
The construction of Libyan “traditions” under the auspices of Italian colo-
nial politics was only one factor in determining Italian architects’ interest in

Modern Architecture, Preservation, and the Discourse on Local Culture 63

fig. 2.1. A window display in Corso Vittorio Emanuele III, Tripoli, 1925. Author’s
collection.

local culture. A more specific influence was the construction of regional iden-
tity in architectural periodicals. This discourse appeared in the pages of Archi-
tettura e Arti Decorative, which began publication in 1921 under the guidance
of its two editors, Gustavo Giovannoni and Marcello Piacentini.10 This jour-
nal was a crucial reference point for contemporary debates within modern
architecture and the decorative arts, arguing for an appreciation for the
fig. 2.2. Courtyard of the Qaramanli house (ca. 1790) in Tripoli. From Architettura
e Arti Decorative 3, no. 5 ( January 1924): 194.

indigenous traditions of the various regions of Italy. Notably, at the same time
that this journal was constructing a regional identity for modern Italian archi-
tecture, it presented the indigenous architecture of Libya as a particular man-
ifestation of Italy’s regional traditions.
One of the most important essays to appear in the journal was Pietro
Romanelli’s “Vecchie case arabe di Tripoli,” which was published in January
1924. This research, which presented eleven of the twenty-four private resi-
dences that had been singled out for conservation in November 1921, was a
direct product of the Volpi administration’s preservation program.11 Roma-
nelli categorized these courtyard houses into three distinct groups, based
upon their age and their architectural influences. He also overlaid a political
agenda on this scholarly one by arguing that “the plan of the Tripolitanian
house, in its simplicity, is closer than any other Eastern house to the Roman
one.”12 In the end, Romanelli asserted that the Roman domus was the under-
lying basis for the Arab house, while at the same time observing that it had
been modified to better correspond to the cultural practices of the local pop-
ulations. The essay further linked the native architecture of this region to Ital-
ian influences by arguing that the decorative schemes of buildings like the
Qaramanli house in Tripoli (ca. 1790) were related to seventeenth-century

Modern Architecture, Preservation, and the Discourse on Local Culture 65

Italian sources, and that the craftsmen who built these projects were “with-
out a doubt Italian”13 (see fig. 2.2). Romanelli’s argument that the so-called
Arab house in Tripolitania was based upon Roman precedents and related to
Italian influences became the predominant view of Italian architects in the
late 1920s and early 1930s, and thus provided a scholarly justification for their
use of indigenous forms.

toward a modern colonial architecture

Italian architects practicing in Tripolitania during the Volpi administration
showed little interest in referencing indigenous buildings, despite the existence
of a scholarly discourse on this architecture. However, with the hiring of
Alessandro Limongelli as art consultant to the city of Tripoli in 1928, this sit-
uation changed quite dramatically. He was responsible for opening up the
architectural scene in Libya through invited commissions and open compe-
titions. His own work was also a part of this transformation, since his self-
conscious use of classicism was carefully integrated with the local architecture.
The synthesis of modern (and Roman) and indigenous is clearly evident in
the 1931 proposal for the restructuring of the Piazza Italia in Tripoli. Work-
ing with the existing walls of the old city alongside the castle and with an
appreciation of the definition of its open spaces, Limongelli integrated a clas-
sicized urban image of Italian architecture with the materials and built land-
scape of North Africa (see fig. 2.3).
One of the important figures in opening architectural discourse in Tripo-
litania to the contemporary discourse in Italy was Maurizio Rava, general sec-
retary of Tripolitania and father of the rationalist architect Carlo Enrico Rava.
The elder Rava authored an influential report on the present and future devel-
opment of Tripoli and the surrounding oasis, which was published in several
colonial journals in 1929.14 This essay called for the preservation of the local
character of Tripoli through a careful program of conserving the most rep-
resentative existing buildings and introducing new structures that harmonized
with the colonial environment.
In addition to making suggestions for conserving the historic character of
Tripoli and the surrounding oasis, the essay argued that the local architecture—
and specifically the Arab house—oªered a valid source for the creation of a
contemporary colonial architecture. There were multiple bases for this appro-
priation, the first being the visual eªect of the indigenous constructions. These
qualities were evident in what Rava referred to as “the geometric and alter-
nating play of volumes,” and “the coloration of the vast smooth walls with

66 Brian L. McLaren
fig. 2.3. Proposal for the rearrangement of the Piazza Italia in Tripoli (1931), by Alessan-
dro Limongelli. From Rassegna di Architettura 5, no. 9 (September 1933): 397.

lively and soft hues.” Rava also argued that the Arab house, which was typi-
cally organized around an outdoor courtyard, was an appropriate source of
ideas for contemporary architects, based on its typology. In a manner similar
to Pietro Romanelli in his earlier essay, Rava asserted that “the Arab patio is . . .
the ideal and most logical solution that is also intimately ours, since it goes
back in its time to the classical house of ancient Rome.”15 These local con-
structions were seen to accommodate the climatic demands of North Africa
through a combination of verandas and ample greenery within the court-
yard, and the restricted use of openings in their relatively mute exterior walls.
In concluding his essay, Rava made a clear connection between the moder-
nity of the “simple linear and cubic combinations” and “smooth and bare
walls” of the Arab house, and the problem of a contemporary architecture,
stating, “It will be simple to fuse all of the technical specialization and prac-
tical comfort of the most modern European constructions with the local
characteristics.”16
The second and most significant attempt to theorize a modern colonial
architecture based on indigenous sources was his son Carlo Enrico Rava’s
1931 essay entitled “Di un’architettura coloniale moderna.” The theoretical
position it espoused was part of a “Panorama of Rationalism,” in which the
younger Rava argued that Italian architects should seek a more independent
direction proper to their Latin cultural roots—a direction whose inspiration

Modern Architecture, Preservation, and the Discourse on Local Culture 67

would be the indigenous architecture of the Mediterranean region. In the
essay, he asserted that indigenous Libyan architecture provided a rational solu-
tion to the problem of building in the colonial context, due to the fact that it
was designed according to the region’s climate and geography. In his discus-
sion, he noted that there were three main attributes that made these build-
ings an appropriate source for a modern colonial architecture. The first of
these qualities, their Roman influence, was linked with “the practical and
organizing spirit of Rome” that, according to Rava, was “still very vital in the
scheme of the Arab-Turkish house.”17 The rationality of this indigenous source
had to do both with its derivation from an ancient precedent and with its
accommodation of functional and climatic demands.
A second quality that Carlo Enrico Rava found in indigenous architecture
in Libya was what he described as “the impulse of a vigorous primitivism
that . . . derives from its relations with the populations of the South.”18 This
tendency was connected with its use of simple geometric forms in buildings
like the mosque in Qasr al-Hajj, a structure whose cubic massing and spher-
ical and pyramidal forms, it was argued, were analogous to the abstract works
of Russian constructivism. The final characteristic Rava identified in the indige-
nous architecture of this region was what he described as its Mediterranean
character—a quality he connected to “the composition of blank rhythms of
cubes and parallelipeds” and to “the large superimposed and alternating veran-
dahs and roof terraces.”19 In this context, he argued that the characteristic
forms of the simplest Arab houses found in the oasis of Tripoli were similar
to the indigenous architecture of the Italian Mediterranean (see fig. 2.4). How-
ever, in the process of defining the Mediterranean character of Libyan archi-
tecture, the Arab cultural identity was largely removed. Rava alluded to this
when he stated: “We will not derive anything from the Arabs, but . . . we relate
to the real, the great tradition of Rome, that admirably endured through the
centuries, and today rejoins us.”20
Carlo Enrico Rava’s inquiry into indigenous Libyan architecture was not
only closely tied to modern architectural discourse, its means of appropria-
tion was also modern. His experience of the local architecture in Libya and
the dissemination of its image were modern, tied as they were to the
detached mode of encounter of the metropolitan traveler and the lens of the
camera. The Mediterranean qualities of the Arab house in Libya were not
so much present in the original buildings, as they were expressed in their
image, which was profoundly shaped by a modern photographic aesthetic.
In addition, terms like primitivism that were used to analyze the indigenous
architecture were a product of modern modes of artistic and cultural analy-

68 Brian L. McLaren
fig. 2.4. An Arab house in the oasis of Tripoli (December 1929), by Carlo Enrico Rava.
From Domus 42 ( June 1931): 33.

sis. Indeed, the Libyan people were often treated as a primitive society that
could be understood through a direct reading of their customs and their cul-
tural artifacts. The seeming objectivity of this “scientific” appropriation of
the indigenous culture of Libya was the almost universal basis by which it
was examined by Italian architects and scholars.
Notably, the arguments presented by Rava were consistent with his own
projects in the colonies, such as his design for the Hotel at the Excavations
of Leptis Magna—a project executed in conjunction with Sebastiano Larco.
The connection between the project and the principles of Italian rationalism
is evident in the fact that its drawings were exhibited at the 1928 Exhibition
of Rationalist Architecture in Rome. Upon its publication in Architettura e
Arti Decorative in 1931, it was seen as a direct derivation of the “most sane and
acceptable” rationalist principles—that is, as “pure architectonic construc-
tivity and functionality” and “the total and exclusive response of the external
expression to the internal organism.”21 At the same time, it was understood
as “completely contextualized to a Mediterranean country,” based upon the
perception that it had “conserved in the voids the sense of proportion typi-
cal to the houses of Libya.”22 A second article published on the project rec-
ognizes this same acclimatization to the Libyan environment—a quality which

Modern Architecture, Preservation, and the Discourse on Local Culture 69

fig. 2.5. Seafront view of the Hotel at the Excavations of Leptis Magna, in al-Khums.
From Domus 44 (August 1931): 21.

the article associated with the large veranda that faced the Mediterranean
(see fig. 2.5).23
Constructed to cater to tourist interest in the archeological site at Leptis
Magna, the ground floor of the hotel was organized around a central cov-
ered courtyard that linked a series of large public rooms with the primary
orientation of the building toward the Mediterranean. This area was dedi-
cated to the residents, for whom this space connects to an upper level that
contains all of the guest rooms.24 On the opposite side of the building, a sec-
ond entrance faced the oasis of Al-Khums and the archeological site. As well
as providing a point of intersection between these two distinct faces of the
building, the courtyard was intended to refer to the vernacular tradition of
the Arab house. This indigenous source was, for Rava, both derived from
Roman origins and reflective of modern exigencies, such that “the conditions
of nature and climate are . . . the generators of architectonic form.”25 The
Hotel at the Excavations of Leptis Magna was a combination of the theoret-
ical and formal concerns typical to Italian rationalism, with abstract typolog-
ical and climatic references to the indigenous architecture of the region.
Although attempting to contextualize the project with the local environment,
these architects ignored the cultural significance of its indigenous sources.
The Hotel at the Excavations of Leptis Magna was the product of an attempt
to incorporate the local architecture into a broader Mediterranean expression—
an expression that was, in its essence, already Italian.

70 Brian L. McLaren
regionalist practices and racist discourses
The discourse on the native architecture of Libya that was expressed in the
writings and projects of Carlo Enrico Rava was subject to a number of trans-
formations in the late 1930s, transformations that were largely the result of
changing political demands. In part owing to the imperial rhetoric generated
by the Italian conquest of Ethiopia, the indigenous politics of Libya—then
governed by Italo Balbo (1934–40)—took on an authoritarian, and even
racist, tone. The connection between Italian colonial politics and race is appar-
ent in the legislation that eventually incorporated Libya into metropolitan
Italy, in January of 1939. Arguing that there was a fundamental diªerence
between the Arab-Berber populations of the coastal regions and the Negroid
races of the southern military zone, Balbo decided that the former should
become a province of Italy, but the latter would remain a colony.26
In this context, the views of Rava on the contemporary value of indige-
nous Libyan architecture gave way to several new tendencies. One of these
theoretical positions was expressed in the work and writings of Giovanni
Pellegrini. This Milanese architect relocated to Libya in the late 1920s to join
the public works o‹ce in Tripoli. He became one of the most active archi-
tects during the Balbo era, constructing a wide range of projects, including
public buildings, agricultural town centers, and private villas.27 Pellegrini’s
contribution to the theoretical discourse on the use of indigenous forms was
his “Manifesto dell’architettura coloniale.” This 1936 essay built upon Rava’s
ideas in arguing for the utilization of indigenous elements like porticoes and
pergolas in order to deal with the demands of the North African climate
(see fig. 2.6). He also asserted that the urban aesthetic of colonial cities should
be related to the indigenous architecture, recommending that new build-
ings be “modeled plastically” in order to attain the same “eªect of mass and
polychromy.”28
A second aspect of this manifesto which linked it with the writings of Rava
was its use of the Arab house as the basis for building in the colonial context.
In contrast to the views of Rava, however, this “tradition” was rationalized
as both the basis of typological models and the source of practical solutions.
For Pellegrini, the Arab house was useful to Italian architects because it con-
tained “the best architectural techniques and the best solution for the adap-
tation of life to the geographical and climatic conditions.” One of the most
important aspects of the Arab house was its central courtyard, which was
enhanced through elements like loggias, galleries, and vegetation. The aes-
thetic of the exterior of these houses was linked to the “exaltation of the por-

Modern Architecture, Preservation, and the Discourse on Local Culture 71

fig. 2.6. An isolated house in Tripoli, 1936, photographed by Giovanni Pellegrini. From
Rassegna di Architettura 8, no. 10 (October 1936): 355.

tal, the concealment of the interior of the house,” and “the sense of austerity
of family life.”29
In using Libyan traditions as the basis for a contemporary colonial archi-
tecture, Pellegrini’s “Manifesto” proposed a fusion of the examples provided
by indigenous buildings with modern technical and aesthetic practices.30
Although on the surface this would appear to be the same argument oªered
some five years earlier, there are some significant diªerences. In Rava’s
“Panorama of Rationalism,” the Libyan vernacular was subjected to a his-
torical scheme that theorized its Latin, African, and Mediterranean identity.
In the “Manifesto dell’architettura coloniale,” Pellegrini “selected” the indige-
nous building forms, according to a modern technical and visual sensibility,
as the solution to the problem of climate and the basis for a contemporary
aesthetic.31
Another key protagonist in the development of a modern colonial archi-
tecture was Florestano Di Fausto, an architect who was already well known

72 Brian L. McLaren
for his work on the master plan and public buildings of the colony of Rhodes
during the late 1920s.32 The Mediterranean architecture of Di Fausto was a
form of regionalism that attempted to absorb the characteristic forms and
incorporate the building traditions of the local architecture. Although his work
in Libya was wide-ranging, his most representative projects were a distillation
of the Libyan building traditions. In some of the most direct examples of the
adoption of local forms, like his 1938 proposal for a madrasa in Tripoli, Di Fausto
worked in the ambiguous space between restoration and new construction.
The theoretical position of Di Fausto was expressed in a 1937 article enti-
tled “Visione mediterranea della mia architettura.” In this essay, he argued that
an architecture for Italy’s Mediterranean colonies had always been, and should
continue to be, based upon a careful reading of the local architecture. In a
presentation of the large body of work that he constructed throughout this
region, he emphasized a deliberate and studied process that established a
close relationship between these projects and their historical and environmen-
tal contexts.33 This is an approach to colonial architecture that called for the
direct incorporation of local references into a contemporary expression. As
a result, the Arab identity of Libyan architecture was reenacted as part of an
eclectic architectural vocabulary for the purpose of harmonizing what was
built with the spirit of the place.34
This approach to colonial architecture is evident in Di Fausto’s design for
the ‘Ain el-Fras Hotel in Ghadames in 1935. This project responded to the
formal language of the city, which is a complex labyrinth of narrow passages,
covered courtyards, and terraces shaped by dense, walled structures. Form-
ing one edge of a large piazza in front of one of the main gates of the old
city that is characterized by its luxuriant landscape, the project created a mas-
sive exterior wall behind which is a series of courtyard spaces. The ‘Ain el-
Fras Hotel establishes a direct relationship to its oasis setting, something that
is clearly evident when looking at the arcaded wings that flank the central
body of the building (see fig. 2.7). There is an unmistakable relationship
between this courtyard and the Piazza of the Large Mulberry. This very inti-
mate urban space in the old town of Ghadames was described in the tourist
literature as an “intersection of gloomy caves, vaults, large niches that pierce
the four white wall of the piazza with their shade.”35
The mimetic relationship between the building and the town of Ghadames
can also seen in the interior spaces of the hotel. The timber ceilings, rich wall
coverings, and minimal use of furnishings in the ‘Ain el-Fras were intended
to suggest the experience of the indigenous houses. These buildings, which
were largely inaccessible to tourists, were described as being like “jewel boxes,”

Modern Architecture, Preservation, and the Discourse on Local Culture 73

as they contained all of the family treasures.36 While on the surface this may
seem to be a fundamentally anti-modern approach, it is important to recog-
nize that this is merely a different kind of modernity.
The writings and works of Di Fausto reveal that, under the weight of Ital-
ian imperial politics, an interest in the indigenous architecture of Libya had
shifted from its modernist origins. An equally scientific interpretation of
Libyan architecture to that advanced by Di Fausto was oªered in Fabrizio
Maria Apollonj’s 1937 essay, “L’architettura araba della Libia.” In arguing that
“nothing is more suggestive than the bare and taciturn appearance of an Arab
house,” Apollonj drew an analogy between the indigenous architecture,
which he described as having “a primitivism, frank and free of any real artis-
tic consistency,” and the people, whom he characterized as “a poor and static
population.”37 The idea that architecture is the direct expression of a people
and its culture is closely tied to the contemporary research of individuals
like Professor Emilio Scarin of the University of Florence, for whom the
Troglodyte houses of the Jabal Nafusah region (see fig. 2.8) were an authen-
tic repository of the customs and practices of the local populations.38 In the
context of Fascist Italy in the latter part of the 1930s, this “scientific” read-
ing of the Libyan people through their cultural artifacts must be understood
as having quite serious political connotations. At the same time that the Fas-
cist government instituted its “Provisions for the defense of the Italian race”—
including a law that prevented intermarriage between diªerent racial and
religious groups in Italy—in the journal Difesa della Razza, a number of noted
scholars on colonial matters theorized a racial science to support Fascist impe-
rial politics.39

conclusion
The projects of Rava and Di Fausto in Libya raise important questions about
the ambivalent status of modern architecture in the Italian colonies. Through
incorporating indigenous references as a means of creating a contemporary
colonial architecture, these architects reflected the shifting direction of Ital-
ian colonial politics. Although both negotiated between the forces of mod-
ernization that saw Libya as Italy’s fourth shore, and those that were involved
in the preservation of the indigenous culture, each did so in a diªerent way.
In the case of the Hotel at the Excavations of Leptis Magna, by Rava, we have
a work whose Arab identity has been suppressed in favor of the structural and
aesthetic principles of modernity. The ‘Ain el-Fras Hotel, of Di Fausto, which
directly reproduces native forms, oªers a modernity of historic preservation—

74 Brian L. McLaren
fig. 2.7. View of the courtyard of the Hotel ²Ain el-Fras in Ghadames, postcard,
ca. 1937. Author’s collection.

fig. 2.8. Libya, Troglodyte house, Jabal Nafusah region, postcard, ca. 1937. Author’s
collection.
a modernity that objectivizes and historicizes the native in the manner of
contemporary science. In the end, both of these projects reveal certain fun-
damental problems that would have existed in any attempt to create an Ital-
ian identity for modern architecture in Libya through a recourse to indigenous
sources. The architectural traditions of Libya were not only constructed by
Italian architects as a repository of native culture, they were also the mate-
rial bases from which an architectural identity was produced, an identity
whose Mediterranean character disguised an oppressive politics of cultural
dominance and racial superiority.

notes

1. Homi K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial

Discourse,” in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 86.
2. Sergio Romano, Giuseppe Volpi: Industria e finanza tra Giolitti e Mussolini
(Milan: Bompiani, 1979), 113–20.
3. Renato Bartoccini, “Gli edifici di interesse storico, artistico ed archeologico
di Tripoli e dintorni,” in La rinascità della Tripolitania: Memorie e studi sui quattro
anni di governo del Conte Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata (Milan: Casa Editrice A. Mon-
dadori, 1926), 350–52.
4. Francesco M. Rossi, “Le Piccole industrie indigene,” in La rinascità della
Tripolitania, 517.
5. Ibid., 518.
6. See Alfred Bel and Prosper Ricard, Le travail de la laine a Tlemcen (Alger:
Typ. A. Jourdan, 1913); and Prosper Ricard, Corpus de tapis marocains, 8 vols. (Paris:
Guenther, 1923).
7. Prosper Ricard, Pour comprendre l’art musulman dans l’Afrique du Nord et en
Espagne (Paris: Hachette, 1924).
8. Prosper Ricard, “Les arts tripolitains, parte I,” Rivista della Tripolitania 2
( January–February): 203– 35; 4–5 (March–April 1926): 275–92; Prosper Ricard,
Les arts tripolitains (Rome: Tipografia del Senato del Dott. G. Bardi, 1926).
9. Ricard, “Les arts tripolitains, parte I,” no. 4–5, 286–87.
10. For a detailed analysis of the activities of Giovannoni and Piacentini, see
Richard Etlin, Modernism in Italian Architecture, 1890–1940 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1991), 101–61.
11. Pietro Romanelli, “Vecchie case arabe di Tripoli,” Architettura e Arti Deco-
rative 3, no. 5 ( January 1924): 193–211.
12. Ibid., 195.

76 Brian L. McLaren
 13. Ibid., 211.
14. Maurizio Rava, “Dobbiamo rispettare il carattere dell’edilizia tripolina,”
L’Oltremare 3, no. 11 (November 1929): 462.
15. Ibid., 462–63.
16. Ibid., 463–64.
17. Carlo Enrico Rava, “Di un’architettura coloniale moderna, parte prima,”
Domus 41 (May 1931): 89.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Carlo Enrico Rava, “Di un’architettura coloniale moderna—Parte seconda,”
Domus 42 ( June 1931): 36.
21. “Architetture libiche degli Arch. Carlo Enrico Rava e Sebastiano Larco,”
Architettura e Arti Decorative 10, no. 13 (September 1931): 682.
22. Ibid.
23. “L’Albergo agli Scavi di Leptis Magna,” Domus 44 (August 1931): 21–23.
24. Ibid., 21.
25. Rava, “Di un’architettura coloniale moderna—Parte seconda,” 32.
26. Italo Balbo, “La politica sociale fascista verso gli arabi della Libia,” in Con-
vegno di scienze morali e storiche, 4–11 ottobre 1938. Tema: L’Africa (Rome: Reale
Accademia d’Italia, 1939), 1:734.
27. See Gian Paolo Consoli, “The Protagonists,” Rassegna 51 (September 1992):
58–59. See also Plinio Marconi, “L’architettura nella colonizzazione della Libia:
Opere dell’Arch. Giovanni Pellegrini,” Architettura 18, no. 12 (December 1939):
711–26.
28. Pellegrini, “Manifesto dell’architettura coloniale,” Rassegna di Architettura
8, no. 10 (October 1936): 349–50.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid., 349.
31. The “Manifesto” was followed by a series of fifty-one photographs,
twenty-nine of which were taken by Pellegrini. The remaining photos were
the kind produced by local studios for tourist consumption. Each image was
accompanied by both a title and a brief commentary. This text provided a literal
identification or a general geographic location, along with a description of the
building’s particular applicability to the task of creating a contemporary archi-
tecture (ibid., 355, 357).
32. See Michele Biancale, Florestano Di Fausto (Geneva: Editions “Les Archives
Internationales,” 1932).
33. Florestano Di Fausto, “Visione mediterranea della mia architettura,”
Libia 1, no. 9 (December 1937): 16.

Modern Architecture, Preservation, and the Discourse on Local Culture 77

 34. Ibid., 18.
35. Itinerario Tripoli-Gadames (Milan: Tipo-Litografia Turati Lombardi,
1938), 66.
36. One of the few houses accessible to tourists was located near the ‘Ain
el-Fras, and was described as follows: “On the outside it does not diªer a lot from
the others. Crossing the threshold, a steep stair, with delightful decorations
sculpted or etched in the walls, leads to the main floor and flows into the central
room, that one can say is representative. No furniture. On the floor are mats and
carpets. The richness is on the mantels of the walls where innumerable silver,
pewter and brass vases are collected. This is the jewel box: this is the safe of the
family” (ibid., 72).
37. Apollonj, “L’architettura araba della libia,” Rassegna di Architettura 9, no.
12 (December 1937): 461.
38. See Scarin, L’insediamento umano nella Libia occidentale (Verona: A. Mon-
dadori, 1940).
39. This provision, which was called the “Regio decreto—legge 17 novembre
1938—XVII, n. 1728, recante provvedimenti per la difesa della razza italiana,” was
presented at the Presidency of the Council of Ministers for passage into law on
November 25, 1938.

78 Brian L. McLaren
part ii Building the Nation
3 Visions of Iraq
Modernizing the Past in 1950s Baghdad

magnus t. bernhardsson

O n August 23, 1921, the citizens of Baghdad witnessed a hastily

arranged, historic, and somewhat comical ceremony. In the court-
yard of the Serai, a grand-looking 1861 Ottoman palace, British mil-
itary and civil administrators stood solemnly during a symbolic transfer of
power. The leader that the British had hand-picked to govern Iraq, Faysal ibn
Husayn, sat on a throne hurriedly made from Indian beer cases. Flanked by
the British o‹cials, he listened to the formal proclamations declaring him
king of the newly established Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq. He then stood
up, uttered a few words, and tentatively stepped forward on a red Persian rug,
while a British military band played the British national anthem, “God Save
the King”—the Iraqi anthem had yet to be composed.1
This coronation was very much a British aªair and hardly pregnant with
Iraqi patriotism. From an international legal perspective, Iraq was a new entity
on the world stage. In many ways, its initial existence was predicated on British
geopolitical concerns.2 But Iraq at this point was a state in search of a nation.
As sociologist Sami Zubaida points out, it was the state that initially made
the nation.3
The new national government inherited from the Ottoman Empire diverse
urban and rural communities with diªerent economic orientations and his-
torical memories. Under the watchful eyes of British advisors, Faysal and his
government proceeded to nurture relevant institutions befitting a modern
country in the postcolonial era. The events of World War I, the British occu-

81
pation, and the breakup of the Ottoman Empire had created fresh facts on
the ground. The Iraqi nationalist challenge was to eªectively respond to these
new realities and develop a sense of belonging among the many Iraqi groups.
The government had to compete in the marketplace of loyalties by defining
and promoting a modern Iraqi sensibility. Given the fragility of the Iraqi econ-
omy, the context for this articulation was particularly di‹cult. Further, the
British restricted the actions of the Iraqi government so that it would not
imperil British imperial interests, especially in the areas of defense and eco-
nomic development. For example, the Iraqi Petroleum Company had a monop-
oly on oil production in the country and was dominated by British and other
Western concerns. Iraq had no shareholders in the company. During the first
three decades of Iraq’s existence, an insignificant amount of the oil revenue
stayed in Iraq. This arrangement exploited Iraqi natural resources, with no
material benefits to Iraqi society. The British also continued to maintain mil-
itary bases in Iraq and thus restricted Iraqi sovereignty and control over its
own defense. Despite these limitations, Iraqis did develop a multifaceted
national identity. As in other countries, this was an intricate and convoluted
process, constantly changing with political and cultural circumstances.
Iraqi national identity has always been fluid, based on many competing,
even contradictory visions of what modern Iraq should be.4 Is Iraq part of
the pan-Arab nation whose destiny was largely shaped by its Islamic heritage,
or is it a unique nation due to its Mesopotamian, pre-Islamic history? These
notions were not viewed as mutually exclusive, but rather enjoined under
the broad rubric of Iraqi nationalism. Iraqis have defined their national iden-
tity by appealing to a broad spectrum of images, memories, dynasties, and
histories. The question—What is Iraq?—has many diªerent answers persist-
ently subject to change and interpretation.
This essay investigates this question in the realm of architecture and urban
planning, showing how architects contributed to a vibrant cultural experi-
ment that forged a distinct but multifaceted Iraqi voice and aesthetic in music,
visual arts, and poetry. Focusing on the ambitious and fantastic plans to mod-
ernize Baghdad in the 1950s, we can see the roots of a nationalistic modern
architecture predicated on a rereading and appreciation of the distant Iraqi
past. For young and ambitious Iraqi architects, the Islamic and pre-Islamic
past was modernized and ancient forms and motifs put to use for the con-
temporary Iraqi nation.
These eªorts took on an interesting twist because some of the world’s
most famous architects, such as Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright,
became part of the conversation during the 1950s. The activities during this

82 Magnus T. Bernhardsson
decade laid the foundation for a modern Iraqi architecture in which Iraqi archi-
tects sought creative paradigms drawn from Iraq’s near and distant history.
Reflecting the local environment and local traditions, this architecture was
intended to convey a distinctly nationalist political and cultural spirit, while
also embracing universal elements influenced by foreign techniques and
trends. When evaluating the architectural trends of the 1950s, the vitality of
the very idea of Iraq becomes clearer. In recent years, many commentators
have questioned whether there is such as a thing as an Iraqi nation. As this
essay suggests, however, there are multiple interpretations of what consti-
tutes Iraq. These notions are fluid and in a constant flux, indicating regener-
ation and renewal. Iraqi national identities are characterized by this
fluctuation, which is represented also in modern Iraqi architecture.
In contrast to many nations whose common denominators are language
or blood, Iraqi leaders stressed culture and history, making modern-day Iraqis
the inheritors of ancient Mesopotamian culture and/or the Abbasid Caliphate.
In a nationalism based on sometimes vague and shifting cultural paradigms,
where appropriate themes and images are located in what has been con-
structed as the national linear historical narrative, the practice of archaeol-
ogy was crucial in providing a scientific basis for the nationalistic rhetoric. In
Iraq, this nationalism based on cultural paradigms proved to be an impor-
tant and eªective tool to inculcate a distinct Iraqi national identity.
Unlike nationalisms based on language or race, paradigmatic national-
ism, inherently tied to the ideology of the government and changing with
political winds, is more prone to vacillation and political manipulation. In
Iraq, the o‹cial emphasis wavered from stressing Iraq’s pan-Arab ties (espe-
cially during the first twenty years of the Hashemite monarch) and stress-
ing an identity concentrated more on Iraq’s Mesopotamian heritage (as
during the years 1958–63 and during much of Saddam Hussein’s presidency).
The role of paradigmatic nationalism is particularly evident in the develop-
ment of Iraqi architecture, oªering a vernacular to develop the modern archi-
tecture of Iraq.

developing baghdad as a modern capital

By the time that the British installed Faysal as king in 1921, Baghdad was not
the city of imperial splendor and magnificence it had enjoyed during Abbasid
times. Similar to the Abbasid caliphs who reigned in Baghdad centuries before
him, Faysal had ambitious plans to reconstruct Baghdad and mold its physi-
cal layout to suit his political and strategic interests. An immediate concern

Visions of Iraq 83
for Faysal’s government was to consolidate and centralize authority and thus
weaken the power of the various tribal leaders in the countryside.5 Baghdad,
which in Ottoman times had been a provincial town on the margins of empire,
once again became a center of political and cultural power, destined to be inte-
gral to the political future of Iraq.6 In many ways, it was returning to its tra-
ditional role as a burgeoning metropole, brimming with tradition and legacy.
In the first decades of the government’s existence, the emphasis was on
developing the army, the educational system, and transportation and commu-
nication infrastructure.7 In this era, most of government’s expenditures went
toward defense and irrigation. By the 1950s, however, the Iraqi government was
moving beyond the building of institutional foundations and had embarked
on the large-scale project of developing a “modern,” more urbanized nation.
Like politicians in Asia and the Americas, Iraqi o‹cials were becoming more
critical of the imperial legacy, and they now sought to renegotiate the 1928 oil
agreement with the British-dominated Iraqi Petroleum Company (IPC)—
which was “Iraqi” in name alone.8 The new agreement, in 1951, had stagger-
ing results for the Iraqi economy, increasing governmental oil revenues from
5.3 million Iraqi dinars in 1950 to almost 50 million dinars in 1953.9
To help manage this newly acquired revenue, the government established
the Iraq Development Board, with six members including a foreign advisor.10
The IDB was responsible for allocating approximately 70 percent of the new
revenue for “development.” This seemingly far-sighted eªort to utilize new oil
wealth was initially focused on developing Iraq’s agriculture and the natural
environment. By the mid-1950s, the IDB had turned its attention to Baghdad.
The city of Baghdad had experienced considerable change in its architec-
ture in the first part of the twentieth century. In earlier centuries most of the
main administrative buildings, markets, shrines, and mosques had been on
the west side of the Tigris, with a circular wall enclosing the city. Eventually,
the city expanded beyond those walls, and even across the Tigris. As the city
spread to both sides of the river, it was connected by a bridge made of boats.
Around the time of World War I, Rusafa, on the eastern side of the Tigris,
became more developed, and the now famous al-Rashid Street became a major
commercial avenue. After World War II, the city experienced an incredible
population explosion. By some accounts, the population in Baghdad increased
by 90 percent between 1947 and 1957. The Iraqi government therefore had to
respond to this new demographic reality and consider how Baghdad, with
its now one million inhabitants, should be organized.
In the midst of this population explosion, the IDB decided, in 1955, to focus
its attention on developing Baghdad.11 British architects and planning consult-

84 Magnus T. Bernhardsson
ants were engaged to submit a master plan for the city, including redevelop-
ment of the city’s old historic quarters.12 The consultants’ plan recommended
a large-scale urban expansion, including the construction of a comprehensive
road system and five new bridges over the Tigris River to aid in the removal
of the slums that were rapidly expanding on the outskirts of the city.
The master plan addressed some of the growing urban problems of Bagh-
dad, in part by opening up more space for automobiles, an increasingly vis-
ible feature in the streets of modern Iraq. The plan reorganized the city into
a number of distinct parts, with areas designed for educational institutions,
open space, industry, government o‹ces, and royal estates. Many traditional
quarters, with their inward-looking houses and often organized along ethnic
or religious lines, were razed in favor of the new, outward-looking Baghdad.13
These changes were intended to bring “order” to the city, to make it more
legible for the governmental authorities so that they could better control and
administer its citizens. Physically, these changes were expected to “open up”
space in Baghdad; symbolically, it was thought that the city and its inhabi-
tants would become more open to the world around them, incorporating
influences from a variety of sources. This aspect of the plan was particularly
evident in the vibrant and experimental architectural and art of the 1950s.

architecture and the visual arts in the 1950 s

During the 1950s, the work of the Baghdad Modern Art Group ( Jam1t
Baghd1d lil Fann al-H.adEth) became quite prominent and dominant on the
Iraqi scene, and the Institute of Fine Arts became a significant component
of Iraqi intellectual life.14 While the Institute spawned a contingent of artists
working in various fields, perhaps the most conspicuous area of development
was in the visual arts. During World War II, hundreds of allied soldiers from
Europe and America had been based in Iraq. Within the small but remark-
able Polish contingency, there happened to be a number of acclaimed
painters. In their spare time these artists had sought out their Iraqi counter-
parts and had gotten to know the Iraqi cultural scene. Several important Iraqi
painters studied with the Polish soldier-artists, including Faiq Hassan and
Jewad Salim, who would later form the influential Iraqi art group Al-Ruwad
(The Pioneers) in the 1950s. The Poles encouraged the Iraqi artists to reject
their previously held artistic norms and to instead explore new horizons by
working in an individualistic, expressionist manner.15
The Al-Ruwad group and other post–World War II artists developed a dis-
tinctly national style that depicted nature and traditional village life. Some

Visions of Iraq 85
artists, like Jewad Salim, made a deliberate attempt to incorporate Assyrian,
Babylonian, and Abbasid motifs into their paintings and sculpture. Salim, who
had studied in Paris (1938– 39) and Rome (1939–40), had previously worked
in the Department of Antiquities and was well aware of pre-Islamic and Islamic
art forms. This innovative synthesis is evident in his masterpiece, Nasb al-Hur-
riyah (The Monument of Freedom), a gigantic bronze mural in downtown
Baghdad. It contains twenty-five figures and combines Arabic characters with
Sumerian and Babylonian forms that have been clearly influenced by prevail-
ing Western styles.
In their “search for the features of the national personality in art,” Salim
and other Iraqi artists during this period thus sought out cultural and nation-
alistic connections to earlier civilizations.16 In their works, ancient and
medieval civilizations became “Iraqi,” and thus highly relevant to the mod-
ern citizen of Iraq. Heritage or tradition became modernized, and moder-
nity was perceived to be based on tradition.1 7 As these bourgeois Baghdadi
artists experimented with new vocabularies and forms, they often felt trapped
between their social connections to the Westernized elite of Iraq and their
romantic, nostalgic visions of the local people and places they painted in coun-
try scenes or who represented the plight of the working poor in their
poetry.18 These artists became quite prominent within Iraq, displaying their
paintings and publishing journals that reproduced their artwork.
Iraqi architects were also influenced by this cultural scene. Hoshia
Nooradin characterizes the 1950s as a new phase in Iraqi architecture, when
the superficial imitation of foreign trends was no longer acceptable. Instead,
architects developed what Nooradin terms “ local architecture,” which was
based on a reflection and absorption of both foreign and domestic influences.19
Spurring this trend was the return to Baghdad, after studies abroad, of three
architects who would be among the most influential Iraqi architects of the
twentieth century—Rifat Chadirji, Hisham Munir, and Muhammad Makiya.20
The three architects began their careers in the charged cultural and political
environment of Baghdad of the 1950s. It was a time of optimism and growth,
and these young architects sought to instill a new, modern Iraqi aesthetic into
their designs. Like the visual artists and poets of the time, they experimented
with form and structure and they sought to incorporate traditional and cul-
tural paradigms into a modern setting. They found themselves working in
exciting times. They were young and fresh out of school, and their govern-
ment, through the IDB, was about to invest considerable sums of money in
rethinking and redesigning the urban landscape of Iraq.
All of the young architects in this period lobbied to ensure that their voices

86 Magnus T. Bernhardsson
and their talents would be considered in this massive development plan. One
of them, Nizar Ali Jawdat, happened to be the son of the influential politician
Ali Jawdat Al-Ayubbi, who served as prime minister on several occasions, includ-
ing during 1957. According to Louis McMillen, Nizar convinced his father that
it would be more “advantageous to the country to engage some of the world’s
great architects to do their projects rather than the old line British engineer-
ing firms left over from the days of the British protectorate.”21
The IDB’s ambitious goals for a radical new urban design included a new
soccer stadium, national museum, opera house, symphony hall, art gallery,
and post and telegraph o‹ce. The IDB, flush with cash and boundless opti-
mism, contacted many of the leading architects around the world, and Le
Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Gio Ponti, Alvar Aalto, and Frank Lloyd Wright
all agreed to undertake various projects in Baghdad. In the initial plans, Le
Corbusier was to design a sports center and stadium, Gropius a new univer-
sity campus, and Aalto an art museum and central post o‹ce.
The ideas proposed by these world-famous architects were exciting and,
of course, on the architectural cutting-edge. For the new art museum, the
Finnish architect Alvar Aalto designed a virtually square, three-story build-
ing with heavy, closed external walls clad with dark-blue ceramic tiles.22 The
outer walls were supported by a velum system of wedge-shaped columns,
and the top floor included a cafeteria in a rooftop garden. It is a “typical” Aalto
building, with a floor plan that included five asymmetrical galleries arranged
in the same echelon formation that Aalto had designed for a museum in Tallin,
Estonia, and for the Johnson Institute, in Avesta, Sweden (neither building
was built), and closely related to his Aalborg (Denmark) Museum. The Aalto
plan for the Baghdad Art Museum was not particularly “nationalistic,” in that
it did not reflect the aesthetics of local culture or architectural practice. It
was a modern “international” building, fully comparable to other, similar
buildings elsewhere in the world.
Plans for the new University campus were submitted by Walter Gropius
and the Architecture Collaborative. Gropius’s team, then at Harvard, con-
ducted considerable research into traditional Iraqi architecture, seeking to
build on past experience while using modern building methods and mate-
rial. The environmental control issues created by Baghdad’s blazing summer
sun garnered significant attention. Gropius’s team designed sun breakers for
each building, resulting in deep structures with very strong shadows. The loca-
tion of the campus, on a peninsula formed by a bend in the Tigris River, pro-
vided the team with abundant water to develop all kinds of vegetation,
including trees and lawns.23 Though Gropius did take into account the local

Visions of Iraq 87
climate, his drawings were also “international,” in the sense that they were
not meant to convey an “Iraqi” spirit or architecture.24 The main auditorium
on campus, for example, was a modified version of an earlier, failed proposal
to build a Civic Center in Tallahassee, Florida.

frank lloyd wright’s baghdad fantasy

The role of Frank Lloyd Wright in this period is particularly intriguing. His
creative proposal to utilize Iraq’s unique medieval legacy, especially the spirit
of the classic tales and adventures of A Thousand and One Nights, was an
unusual source of inspiration that ran counter to the IDB’s vision of mod-
ernization. The architect Mina Marefat has eloquently chronicled Wright’s
plan for Baghdad and argues that it perhaps constitutes his “magnum opus.”25
Unlike his contemporaries, Wright took an entirely diªerent approach.
When he was originally contacted, Wright had been extremely enthusiastic
about the project. His original response to the Iraqi government basically sums
up his attitude and also reveals his naiveté. He wrote that he was “pleased to
join IRAQ in a twentieth-century enterprise. To me this opportunity to assist
Persia is like a story to a boy fascinated by the Arabian Nights Entertainment
as I was.”26 (Wright obviously made no distinction between Iranians and
Iraqis.) He explained, furthermore, that he had grown up reading the stories
in A Thousand and One Nights and would therefore be thrilled to help build a
new Baghdad, which had been the city of his childhood fantasies. Just like
the Iraqi nationalists of the time, Wright sought new paradigms from Iraqi
history in order to formulate a unique vision of the modern city.
Although his original commission, in 1957, was to design only a combined
theater and opera house, Wright obviously felt that he could achieve more.27
He visited Baghdad that year in order to convince the IDB that he had ambi-
tious plans for Baghdad, and to persuade the board to allow him to design
and develop those plans, which included a “Garden of Eden” theme-type park,
an art gallery, a national museum, and an open-air bazaar.
Wright suggested to the planners in Iraq that they should utilize the spirit
of Harun al-Rashid and of the Abbasid Caliphate, or, as he put it, the “spirit
of the East,” in their plans to develop Baghdad. Wright was adamant that the
Iraqis not “join the Western procession” and mimic what he called the empty
architecture of Western cities. He pleaded instead that “no architect should
come here and put a Western cliché to work.” In his meetings with the Iraqi
planners he essentially went on a diatribe against the blind expansion of West-
ern commercialism, and warned that if they followed that kind of plan, Bagh-

88 Magnus T. Bernhardsson
dad would be facing the same problems of overpopulation and automobile
congestion that Western cities were facing. Juxtaposing Iraq’s spiritualism to
the West’s materialism, Wright urged the Iraqis to “preserve their own spir-
itual integrity according to great oriental philosophies which has inspired East
and West.” Wright’s solution was a “scientific modern principle” for the urban-
ization of Baghdad, one that emphasized decentralization because it “was so
inevitable to the survival of all great cities either West or East.”28
After an apparently persuasive meeting with Wright, the young King Faysal
II (the grandson of Faysal ibn Husayn) decided that Wright alone should be
responsible for a large portion of the reconstruction of Baghdad. Within a
few months, Wright had drawn up plans for the opera house, the theme park,
and post and telegraph o‹ce, botanical gardens, parking garages, an art
gallery, a national museum, and the university. On paper and as art, these
plans were magnificent: in playful and creative ways, they oªered an archi-
tectural interpretation of the many themes of Iraqi history. The ambitious
grandeur of Wright’s plans evoke the fantasies and imaginings of Oriental-
ists through the ages. Yet Wright was attempting to create something new, a
modern aesthetic in the historical setting of Baghdad.
In a reflective address to studio members at Taliesen West, Wright
preached that the duty of the modern architect was not to imitate the past,
but to interpret it creatively in order to link it with the present. Obviously
delighted by his Baghdad project, Wright mused: “It is rather interesting, isn’t
it, to have the—I think they call me the Dean of the Moderns or something
like that—going back to the origin of civilization, to show what civilization
amounts to now.”29
Wright’s plans seemed futuristic, yet based on ancient themes. Wright’s
designs drew heavily on Persian and Arab architecture and were more Orien-
talist than the International Style advocated by the other architects working
on Baghdad projects. His opera house complex was a reference to al-Mansur’s
circular plan of eighth-century Baghdad; it included a graded natural-earth
mound that was designed to form the substructure of most of the buildings,
as an homage to the architecture of ancient Mesopotamia. In many ways,
Wright was experimenting with the various paradigms of Iraqi history, just
as the Iraqi artists were doing with art and poetry. He developed plans that
were clearly based on his own personal relation with medieval Iraqi history
and on what his imagination envisioned Iraq would have looked like at that
time. At the same time, he was very concerned with the needs of contem-
porary urban design, such as the development of leisure spaces and the lim-
iting of tra‹c congestion.

Visions of Iraq 89
 Wright’s fantasy of reconstructing the city in A Thousand and One Nights
came to an abrupt end, however, in the summer of 1958. On July 14, a mili-
tary coup, spearheaded by General Abd al-Karim Qasem, overthrew the
Hashemite monarchy. Throngs of people took part in the violent mayhem,
which resulted in the horrific death of the king and of some of his closest
associates. The regime that had started rather unceremoniously with Faysal
ibn Husayn’s coronation in 1921 came to an even more abrupt end. And one
year later, Wright himself passed away.

iraqi national architecture

Under Qasem, the new government in Iraq showed little interest in the
grandiose plans of the IDB. Indeed, the agency was considered part and par-
cel of the corrupt and questionable nature of the Hashemite Kingdom. The
Qasem regime had diªerent ideas of what constituted the nation and how
to define modernity. It did not consider the construction of flashy cultural
buildings a pressing concern, especially when large segments of Iraqi society
did not have access to su‹cient education or health care. Wright’s plans did
not resonate with how the new government wanted to identify itself or with
how it wanted to expend its revenue. Nevertheless, other architects, for exam-
ple, Gropius and Le Corbusier, continued their work with the new regime.
The University of Baghdad, which Gropius designed, was opened in 1961, after
Gropius had met with Qasen and discussed his plans with him.
The overthrow of the Hashemites was a drastic change of aªairs in Iraqi
history, suggesting, somewhat contradictorily, both the fragile, yet firm foun-
dations of Iraqi national identity and self-image. In subsequent years, Iraqi archi-
tects would have a greater role in defining the urban landscape of Baghdad.
In 1959, the first Iraqi school of architecture was founded by Muhammad
Makiya at Baghdad University. The architecture school drastically changed the
training of Iraqi architects and had a tremendous impact on how Iraqi archi-
tecture would be defined.30 Similar to experiments that were also taking place
in the visual arts and literature, under Makiya and other instructors the school
sought to establish a modern Iraqi architecture that had roots in the country’s
history and traditions.31 Stimulated by the vibrant cultural and political scene
around them, they were inspired by the diªerent paradigms of Iraqi history.
Makiya, for example, was committed to developing an Iraqi architecture
that paid homage to Iraq’s classical Islamic architecture. Unlike Wright’s orna-
mental approach, Makiya viewed Iraqi historical traditions as functional
aspects of the natural environment. His 1963 Khulafa Mosque is perhaps the

90 Magnus T. Bernhardsson
best example of how he worked to conserve, celebrate, and expand classical
Islamic architecture in a modern urban setting. Makiya located the new
mosque in the vicinity of a ninth-century Abbasid site and a historic minaret
from the thirteenth century. Instead of competing with the old structures,
Makiya re-created their medieval ambience through the use of Kufic callig-
raphy and brickwork resembling the original minaret. Instead of being dis-
tinct parts, the structures blend together, creating a seamless whole. In his
presentation, the modern and the traditional are not separate buildings, but
part of the same continuum. Makiya was adamant that historic structures
such as domes and minarets “are so much part of the natural setting that they
stand beyond the label of ‘traditional’ or ‘contemporary.’ ”32 The modern,
thus, did not stand in contrast to the ancient, but was part of the same envi-
ronment, forming the same spatial organization. For Makiya, Iraq was a syn-
thesis of its various pasts, and especially its Islamic past. In his role as a
practitioner, educator, and critic, Makiya would have a tremendous impact
on Iraqi architecture. In 1965 he would design the Museum of Antiquities in
Mosul, and in 1967, the Ministry of Foreign Aªairs in Baghdad.
Makiya’s contemporary, Rifat Chadirji, took a diªerent approach, seek-
ing inspiration in Iraq’s historical past. In 1952, having returning to Baghdad
from graduate training in England, he began work on his architectural
“experiments.”33 Chadirji was critical of the work of the Egyptian Hasan Fathy
and that of Muhammad Makiya; he considered their work “either naive or
simplistic attempts” to resolve very complex problems.34 Although he did not
entirely dismiss their eªorts, Chadirji felt that Iraq exhibited a “cultural gap”
with the West, which could be seen in the disparity in development between
the two cultures, especially in technology.35 Chadirji maintained that this “gap”
could not be bridged by a policy of “narrow regionalism, vernacularism, or
nationalism because of the characteristics of the internationalization of
modern culture.” Instead, he sought to “synthesize concepts gleaned from
the international avant-garde with abstract forms derived from tradition.”36
He called his own approach a “regional, international architecture” that he
claimed excluded replicas of traditional elements. Nevertheless, his buildings,
particularly those from early in his career, do in fact incorporate some tradi-
tional features like archways. These early works were firmly grounded in Iraqi
nationalist discourse, evoking various Iraqi pasts.
Chadirji’s earliest works dealt largely with the restoration of old structures.
In the mid-1950s, he served as the director of the Department of Endowments,
the government agency responsible for the preservation of old mosques and
buildings. In 1960, he was commissioned to design Baghdad’s Monument

Visions of Iraq 91
for the Unknown Soldier. In an obvious homage to Iraq’s pre-Islamic past,
the monument evokes the parabolic arch of the Sassanid Palace of Ctesiphon.
As far as Chadirji was concerned, this ancient structure had meaning for con-
temporary Iraqis. The Ctesiphon arch was thus nationalized and used to com-
memorate Iraqi soldiers, even though Ctesiphon had been the seat for the
ancient Persian Empire in the sixth century. Such historical distinctions
clearly did not matter, for Chadirji or for the population at large. For all intents
and purposes, the Ctesiphon motif, despite its Persian origin, has become a
part of the modern Iraqi vernacular.
The critic Kanan Makiya (son of Muhammad Makiya) claims that Chadirji
was a modernist “at heart,” and that his interest in Iraqi heritage and tradition
was “superficial.” But Chadirji would continue to employ historical motifs and
forms in his architecture, incorporating elements from the Great Mosque of
Samarra and the Palace of Ukhaidir.37 For example, his 1966 o‹ce building
for the Tobacco Monopoly, with its arched windows and column structures,
has the outward appearance of traditional architecture. The interior of the
building, however, is linear, with the o‹ce spaces organized along a corridor—
a more international approach to o‹ce design. Like his Iraqi contemporaries,
Chadirji was developing an Iraqi architectural aesthetic that did not have a sin-
gular feature and that was based on his relationship to and interpretation of
Iraqi history. In inventive ways, Chadirji combined the newest technologies and
the latest trends from abroad with local forms to fashion his Iraqi architecture.
Iraqi architects who came of age in the 1950s had the knowledge, inde-
pendence, and self-confidence to articulate new visions and structures for their
country. Inspired by national tradition and aesthetics as well as the ambitious
fantasies and hopes of foreign architects such as Gropius and Wright, and given
the opportunity to build and test new solutions to local problems and sur-
roundings, the Iraqi architects expanded the notion of Iraqiness. In that way,
they strengthened their belief in the nation and distilled greater pride in its
long and varied history. Although today many people question the validity
of Iraq as an entity or its potential to survive as a nation, these multiple visions
of Iraq, to which Iraqi architects contributed, will sustain the nation in years
to come—despite di‹cult circumstances.

epilogue
It is ironic that one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs did end up having a very
indirect role in the political and cultural development of Iraq. In October 2004
the final presidential debate between George W. Bush and John Kerry was

92 Magnus T. Bernhardsson
held in Gammage Auditorium on the campus of Arizona State University.
The auditorium was designed by Wright, and is basically the national art
gallery that he had proposed for Baghdad. When the IDB’s tenure had come
to an end, Wright submitted the slightly modified plans for this building to
Arizona State, which had commissioned him to design a gallery and audito-
rium for its Art Department.
That October evening in 2004, in a building that was originally supposed
to have housed Iraq’s cultural treasures, two American politicians debated
the American war in Iraq and discussed Iraq’s future. Given America’s dom-
inant role in determining and defining Iraq’s near-term future, an event sim-
ilar to Faysal ibn Husayn’s coronation in 1921 may take place. Instead of British
advisers, however, this time, American o‹cials will “assist” a nascent Iraqi gov-
ernment to take steps toward full independence and sovereignty. Once again,
Baghdad will be subject to ambitious reconstruction plans and extensive
rebuilding. The city that inspired the legend of Scheherazade and her repet-
itive rendition of new tales will once again undergo a period of moderniza-
tion and new urban design to bolster the powers of the new government.
This time around, however, the Iraqi collective memory and the negative expe-
rience of earlier such eªorts will undoubtedly be a complicating factor, and
will possibly derail any plans that do not take into account the aspirations
and desires of the Iraqi people.

notes

I would like to thank Alan DeGooyer, Helga Druxes, Kenda Mutongi, and Kashia
Pieprzak for their helpful comments. I am also grateful to Mina Marefat for all
her help.
1. For the creation of Iraq, see Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000); Reeva Spector Simon, Iraq between the Two
World Wars (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); Stephen Longrigg, Iraq,
1900 to 1950, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953); Peter Sluglett, Britain in Iraq,
1914–1932 (London: Ithaca Press, 1976); Samaira Haj, The Making of Iraq, 1900–1963
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997); and ‘Abd al-Razzaq al-Hasani,
Tarikh al-Wizarat al-’Iraqiyya, 10 vols. (Sidon: al-Maktaba al-Asriya li al-Tiba’a wa
al-Nashr, 1953–1961).
2. There are many works that focus on how Iraq benefited British imperial-
ism, including Reeva Spector Simon and Elanor H. Tejirian, The Creation of Iraq,
1914–1921 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

Visions of Iraq 93
 3. Sami Zubaida, “The Fragments Imagine the Nation: The Case of Iraq,”
International Journal of Middle East Studies 34, no. 2 (2002): 206.
4. For an excellent study of these competing visions, see Eric Davis, Memo-
ries of State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
5. The most thorough study of the Hashemite period is by far Hanat Batatu,
The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1978).
6. For an excellent study of the economic role of Baghdad in the nineteenth
century, see Hala Fattah, The Politics of Regional Trade in Iraq, Arabia, and the Gulf,
1745–1900 (Albany: State University of New York, 1997). See also Muhmmad
Salman Hasan, Al-tatawur al-iqtisadi fi al-Iraq (Sidon: al-Maktaba al-Asriya li al-
Tiba’a wa al-Nashr, 1965).
7. See Reeva Spector Simon, Iraq between the Two World Wars (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1986); Mohammad Tarbush, The Role of the Military
in Politics (London: Routledge, 1985). See also Matthew Elliot, Independent Iraq
(London: I. B. Tauris, 1996).
8. See Mostafa Elm, Oil, Power, and Principle (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Uni-
versity Press, 1992); and Irvine Anderson, Aramco, the United States, and Saudi
Arabia (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981). In the early 1950s, many
countries, such as Venezuela and Iran, made plans to nationalize their major
industries. Saudi Arabia had recently negotiated an agreement with Aramco,
which introduced a 50–50 profit-sharing formula in the Middle East. In 1952,
the IPC agreed to share profits on a 50 – 50 basis (see Ferhang Jalal, The Role
of Government in the Industrialization of Iraq, 1950–1965 [London: Frank Cass,
c. 1972]).
9. Yusuf Sayigh, The Economies of the Arab World (London: Croom Helm,
1978), 37.
10. For the activities of the board, see Jalal, The Role of Government in the Indus-
trialization of Iraq (New York: Praeger, 1967); and Kahdim al-’Eyd, Oil Revenues
and Accelerated Growth (New York: Praeger, 1979).
11. The IDB sought foreign advice. See, e.g., Lord Salter [Arthur Salter], The
Development of Iraq (London: n.p., 195); and World Bank, The Economic Develop-
ment of Iraq (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1952).
12. A copy of the IDB’s master plan, “The Master Plan for the City of Bagh-
dad, 1956,” can be found in the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives (FLWA 5733.001) at
Taliesen West in Phoenix, Arizona.
13. See Samir Al-Khalil [Kanan Makiya], The Monument: Art, Vulgarity, and
Responsibility in Iraq (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 20.
14. See Ulrike al-Khamis, “An Historical Overview, 1900s–1990s,” in Strokes of

94 Magnus T. Bernhardsson
Genius, ed. Maysaloun Faraj (London: Saqi Books, 2001), 22. See also Jabra
Ibrahim Jabra, Juthur al-Fann al-Iraqi (Baghdad: Al-Dar al-Arabiyya, 1986).
15. See al-Khamis, “An Historical Overview,” 23.
16. Dia al-Azzaw in Al-Jumhuriyyah (Baghdad), no. 1432 (1972): 164. A good
example of this type of connection can be found in Rashid Salim, “Diaspora,
Departure, and Remains,” in Strokes of Genius, 55.
17. The books by the critic Jabra Ibrahim Jabra really emphasize this trend among
Iraqi artists; see, e.g., his Jewad Salim wa Nasb al-Hurriya (Baghdad, 1974). See also
Shakir Hasan al-Said, Fusul min tarikh al-haraka al-tashkiliyah fi al-Iraq, 2 vols. (Bagh-
dad: Wizarat al-thaqafah wa al-ilam, 1983); and al-Khalil, The Monument, 79. This
experimentation was not confined to the visual arts. In literature, the Iraqi free-
verse movement (al-shi’r al-hurr) made its first appearance in the early 1950s. Poets
such as Naziq al-Mala’ika, Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, and ‘Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayyati
“radically changed the form of Arabic poetry and constituted a direct and uncom-
promising challenge to the rules that had formed the traditional poetic canon” (Terri
Deyoung, Placing the Poet [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998], 192).
18. This sentiment is expressed in part 1 of Shakir Hasan al-Said, Fusul min
tarikh al-haraka al-tashkiliyah fi al-Iraq, 2 vols. (Baghdad: Wizarat al-thaqafah wa
al-ilam, 1983), 126.
19. See Hoshiar Nooradin, “Globalization and the Search for Modern Local
Architecture: Learning from Baghdad,” in Planning Middle Eastern Cities, ed. Yasser
Elsheshtawy (London: Routledge, 2004), 3.
20. Makiya studied at Liverpool and Cambridge, Chadirji in London, and
Munir at the University of Texas and the University of Southern California.
21. Louis McMillen, “The University of Baghdad, Baghdad, Iraq,” in vol. 4 of
The Walter Gropius Archive, ed. Alexander Tzonis (New York: Garland Publishing,
1991), 189.
22. Göran Schildt and Alvar Aalto, The Complete Catalogue of Architecture, Design,
and Art (New York: Rizzoli, 1994), 122–23.
23. McMillen, “The University of Baghdad,” 190–91.
24. At the same time that Gropius was planning the University, his successor
as Dean of Harvard’s School of Design, José Louis Sert, was designing the new
American Embassy in Baghdad. On the architecture of the Embassy, see Samuel
Isenstadt, “‘Faith in a Better Future’: Josep Lluis Sert’s American Embassy in Bagh-
dad,” Journal of Architectural Education 50 (February 1997): 172–88.
25. Mina Marefat, “Wright’s Baghdad,” in Frank Lloyd Wright: Europe and
Beyond, ed. Anthony Alofsin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
26. Wright to the Iraq Development Board, January 24, 1957, Frank Lloyd
Wright Archives (FLWA) at Taliesen West, Phoenix, Arizona.

Visions of Iraq 95
 27. The standard account of Wright’s plans for Iraq can be found in Neil
Levine’s monumental The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1996), 383–404.
28. FLWA document no. 2401.379, EE, 3–4, Frank Lloyd Wright Archives at
Taliesen West, Phoenix, Arizona.
29. Quoted in Marefat, “Wright’s Baghdad,” 195–96.
30. On the establishment of the School of Architecture, see Fuad A. Uthman,
“Exporting Architectural Education to the Arab World,” Journal of Architectural
Education 31, no. 3 (1978): 26– 30; and Udo Kultermann, “The Architects of Iraq,”
Mimar 5 (1982): 54–61.
31. This emphasis is clearly seen in some of Makiya’s writings—see, e.g., Bagh-
dad (Baghdad: Niqabat al-Muhandisin al-Iraqiyah, 1969).
32. Muhammad Makiya, “The Arab House: A Historical Overview,” in Pro-
ceedings of the 1984 Colloquium on the Arab House, ed. A. D. C. Hyland and Ahmad
al-Shahi (Newcastle: University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 1986), 12.
33. Rifat Chadirji, Concepts and Influences: Towards a Regionalized International
Architecture (New York: Routledge and Paul Kegan, 1986), 39.
34. Ibid., 44.
35. Ibid., 41.
36. Ibid., 49.
37. al-Khalil, The Monument, 95

96 Magnus T. Bernhardsson
4 Baghdad’s Urban Restructuring, 1958
Aesthetics and Politics of Nation Building

panayiota i. pyla

I n August 1955 the Iraq Development Board, a quasi-governmental body

overseeing an accelerated program of national modernization in the young
nation of Iraq, solicited the Greek architect and planner Constantinos A.
Doxiadis to prepare an ambitious housing program for the entire country.
Chaired by Iraq’s premier and supported by Western consultants, the IDB had
at its disposal the lion’s share of the country’s oil revenues (which increased
dramatically in the early 1950s as foreign ownership of the Iraqi petroleum
industry diminished), and it used them to fund the construction of dams, irri-
gation and drainage systems, power plants, bridges, roads, factories, schools,
hospitals, and other buildings.1 Doxiadis was brought on board at the point in
time when the IDB had decided to increase its emphasis on housing and com-
munity facilities, in an eªort to prevent social unrest by providing more visi-
ble signs of progress.2 The need for popular gestures of social reform seemed
urgent because the increasingly unpopular Iraqi government, ruled by the
Hashimite dynasty installed by the British in 1921, saw “uncomfortably obvi-
ous” parallels between Iraq and Czarist Russia, and was nervously hoping to
secure political stability in order to sustain itself. For similar reasons, British
and American consultants also encouraged reform, hoping that Iraq, which
was seen as an important Middle Eastern bastion against Communism, would
not replicate the experience of Egypt, where a 1952 revolt had brought Gamal
Abdel Nasser to power, along with his Soviet-allied policies.3
Doxiadis’s initial charge was to create a comprehensive five-year plan for

97
the improvement of housing conditions throughout the country, and his firm
began with projects in Mosul, Kirkuk, Mussayib, and Baghdad. In 1958, while
the firm was already engaged in the construction of various rural and urban
housing schemes, it was also assigned the task of creating a new master plan
for the rapidly expanding city of Baghdad. As the administrative capital of a
new nation, Baghdad became the focus of the IDB’s activities. An earlier mas-
ter plan, developed jointly by the British firm Minoprio & Spencely and P. W.
Macfarlane in 1956, had instituted zoning principles and proposed the devel-
opment of a system of roads to connect Baghdad’s premodern urban core
to its new river bridges.4 Doxiadis Associates’ master plan aspired to provide
a more comprehensive framework for modernization. By incorporating the
pilot projects Doxiadis Associates had already launched in the capital begin-
ning in 1955, the firm made a double promise that the new comprehensive
restructuring would improve housing for all while providing the foundation
for long-term urban and regional growth.5
This essay focuses on Doxiadis’s 1958 master plan for Baghdad. Moving
from a dicussion of the overall master plan to the design and construction of
specific housing units and public squares, the essay demonstrates how Dox-
iadis’s conceptions of social reform and regional particularity, along with his
technocratic postures of neutrality, became intertwined with the Iraqi
regime’s aspirations to assert the young nation’s modernity and to nurture
pride among its citizens. The goal is twofold: (1) to uncover how Doxiadis’s
formal and social experiments were appropriated as vehicles for building a
modern nation state, and (2) to simultaneously demonstrate that postcolo-
nial Baghdad was a significant site in the larger rethinking of architectural
modernism that characterized the post–World War II era. Since new visions
for reconstructing Baghdad are once again becoming current, it is particu-
larly important to put this recent history of the city in critical perspective.

doxiadis’s appeal
Doxiadis, who had been a Greek government o‹cial from 1945 to 1951, first
as the coordinator of postwar reconstruction and then as the administrator
of the Marshal Plan in Greece, was well known in American and international
development circles, and he was recommended to the Iraq Development
Board by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development.6 Dox-
iadis was at that time taking his very first steps in establishing a private prac-
tice, and even though he had little to show in terms of independent built works
(he barely had any staª when the IDB solicited him in 1955), he succeeded

98 Panayiota Pyla
in securing this commission, which would soon become the stepping stone
for his prolific international practice.7 What made Doxiadis appealing to the
IDB was partly his Greek background that rendered him free of “imperialist
stigma” and distinguished him from most of the other Western consultants,
advisers, and technicians who were streaming into Iraq.8 Doxiadis’s appeal
also stemmed from his planning approach, which he called “Ekistics”—an
approach that emphasized a rational and scientific version of urbanism and
that gave his proposals an apolitical authority.
Defined as “the science of human settlements,” Ekistics was initially for-
mulated by Doxiadis during his work in Greece, and it promised to synthe-
size the input of economics, geography, sociology, anthropology, and other
sciences. Emblematic of a modernist ambition to coordinate the entire sys-
tem of knowledge about the physical environment, Ekistics’ multidisciplinary
approach had a twofold goal. The first goal was to reject the ethos of the indi-
vidual signature-designer and to emphasize the necessity of addressing basic
human needs, well beyond functionalist or technological concerns.9 The sec-
ond goal of Ekistics aimed to reinvent architects and planners as development
experts by emphasizing the significance of the physical environment in pro-
moting socioeconomic development in the post–World War II era.10 Ekistics’
commitment to international urbanization, industrialization, and socioeco-
nomic modernization was in tune with the agenda of international develop-
ment institutions to restructure the so-called underdeveloped countries of the
world according to the paradigm of the industrialized West. However, Doxi-
adis’s emphasis on a rational and scientific planning approach conveniently
obscured such ideological leanings. His standard claim was that Ekistics’ clients
were simply the “common people” of any society, “communist and capitalist
alike.”11 From the perspective of the Iraq Development Board, such a claim
to scientific neutrality conveniently concealed the anti-Communist fears and
pro-Western alliances that motivated the IDB’s own modernizing agenda. Fur-
thermore, Doxiadis’s pledge that social, economic, racial, and ethnic inequal-
ities could be managed away by benevolent technocrats promised to make his
firm’s interventions more acceptable to the highly diverse citizenry of Iraq.
Another equally important reason for Doxiadis’s appeal was that, even as
he claimed that Ekistics would apply scientific truths transnationally, he prom-
ised to make his interventions amenable to local cultural preferences. Doxi-
adis pledged not to act like a “magician planner” who “has all the solutions
up his sleeve and he pulls them out like rabbits.”12 Often implying criticism
of the new cities, like Brasilia in Brazil and Chandigarh in India, Doxiadis prom-
ised that his firm’s proposals would emerge out of exhaustive surveys and

Baghdad’s Urban Restructuring 99

research programs that would “diagnose” each locale’s needs and potential
(notice the scientific and medical authority assumed), and that he would over-
come the functionalist, universalist, and ultimately Eurocentric and homog-
enizing preoccupations of other modernist approaches.13 His dual claim both
to scientific legitimacy and cultural sensitivity was the right combination for
the Iraq Development Board, whose eagerness to provide architectural sym-
bols of the modern state was accompanied by a desire to champion a shared
ideal of national identity and pride.

restructuring the city

To understand the context of Doxiadis’s proposal for Baghdad, it is impor-
tant to remember that the city had been experiencing dramatic transforma-
tions since early in the twentieth century, when its administration changed
hands from the Ottomans to the British. In 1921, when the British established
the constitutional monarchy that brought the Hashimites to power in the
newly formed Iraq, Baghdad became the capital of the new nation, and since
then, it grew by leaps and bounds, both in size and population. In 1932, Iraq
became independent, but after a series of tribal and ethnic revolts, military
coups and counter-coups, it was reoccupied by the British, who installed a
pro-Western government in 1941. From the 1920s to the 1940s, Baghdad’s pop-
ulation tripled, reaching more than half a million, and the city burst out of
its centuries-old confines—circumscribed by the settlement of Rusafah on
the east bank of the Tigris, Al-Karkh on the west bank, and Kazimiyah and
Azimiyah farther north. Especially after the 1920s, with the construction of
a flood protection dyke that stretched from the Tigris north of Azimiya to
the Diyala River east of Karradah, the urban reach of Baghdad expanded
laterally in two directions: northwest toward Azimiyah, and southwest toward
the Diyala (fig. 4.1).14 Some large-scale government-sponsored develop-
ments (e.g., the 1920s Waziriyah) introduced systematic layouts, broad
avenues, and suburban neighborhoods that stood in stark contrast to Rusafa’s
medieval feel—characterized by souks and narrow, tunnel-like residential
streets running under the projecting wooden upper-stories of the densely
built houses.15
In the 1950s, with the establishment of the Iraq Development Board, Bagh-
dad experienced an even more rapid transformation, and by the time Doxi-
adis Associates began to implement its master plan, Baghdad had become a
magnet for new businesses and also the site of ambitious experiments by

100 Panayiota Pyla

fig. 4.1. Map of Baghdad, 1957. University of Illinois Map Library.

world-famous architects.16 Le Corbusier was invited to build a mammoth

sports stadium; Walter Gropius, of The Architects Collaborative, to design
a university campus; Alvar Aalto to design a civic center; Frank Lloyd Wright
to design an Opera House; and there were others.17 Iraqi architects, most of
whom had been educated in Europe, also became involved; these included
Mohamed Makiya, Kahtan Awni, and Rifat Chadirji.
The Doxiadis Associates master plan was based on a planning model of
urban expansion, control, and e‹ciency that Doxiadis would later call
“Dynapolis.”18 Meaning “dynamic city,” Dynapolis was one of the many neol-
ogisms that Doxiadis coined, which made a glossary a necessary feature of
his later books. The core idea of Dynapolis was for the city to expand con-
tinually along one axis, to avert congestion, and for the business district to
grow along this axis, controlled by zoning and the siting of public buildings,

Baghdad’s Urban Restructuring 101

road systems, and green areas. Residential areas would also expand continu-
ally, along the core’s flanks, echoing the open-ended logic of other “ linear
city” concepts, such as Arturo Soria y Mata’s 1882 Ciudad Lineal, Tony
Garnier’s 1901 Cité Industrielle, and the Soviet Linear Cities of the 1930s.19
The concept of Dynapolis was to guide Baghdad’s orderly expansion and
become a symbol and instrument for creating an e‹cient modern capital. Dox-
iadis Associates identified the Tigris River as the reference for establishing the
central axis of growth. Even though the concept theoretically allowed for
indefinite urban expansion, Doxiadis set the ideal population limit of the future
Iraqi capital at three million inhabitants—about three times larger than the 1958
population. This idealized population figure suggested certain maximum geo-
graphical limits for the city, defined by an elongated rectangle oriented along
the main northwest-southeast axis of the river (see fig. 4.2).20 This rectangular
area was subdivided by a system of roads which incorporated some of the exist-
ing major roads, but which also suggested that the opening of new roads would
be adapted to the rectilinear pattern of the new city. The new road system would
provide “an easy connection of the city to the country,” to tie the city into a
larger regional schema.21 Residential sectors and subsectors would also be
arranged according to this rectangular grid, but modified in the center to accom-
modate the commercial district. The commercial district would include the
existing old city center and also the new commercial centers that were expected
to emerge along the main axis of the Dynapolis. The new commercial centers
would have to abide by the rectilinear logic of the road system and residential
grid. The same logic would also guide the placement of industrial districts, which
would be pushed to the edges of the city, so as to preserve the uniformity of
the residential and commercial districts. Any gaps left between the imposed
grid and the winding river would be designated “green space,” the firm’s attempt
at resolving competing rectilinear and organic geometries.
The master plan revealed a preoccupation with visual order, uniformity,
and regularity, and a wholesale preference for low-density building and wide
streets. Such aesthetic preferences were common among planning experts
working in Baghdad at the time, and they were emphasized repeatedly, as
much as the need for fresh water, electric power, and sewage systems.22 The
plan’s blanket dismissal of the old city’s urban density failed to recognize its
social role and ignored the fact that the colorful souks of the old city, despite
their narrowness and darkness (or because of it!), had an immense social value.
The shortcomings of such a preoccupation with an aesthetic of order and
regularity would become even more pronounced in the specific housing
projects proposed by Doxiadis, described below.

102 Panayiota Pyla

fig. 4.2. Master Plan for Baghdad, Iraq, 1958. Cover illustration for “Progress of the
Housing Program,” Doxiadis Associates Monthly Report no. 46, May 1959.

a model community in west baghdad

The Doxiadis Associates’ restructuring of the city along functional lines
became the basis for the design of a model community in the west part of
the city. The Western Baghdad Development Scheme was planned to house
a population of 100,000 inhabitants, either through government-funded hous-
ing or though self-help housing. The scheme proposed diªerent “commu-
nity sectors” of 7,000 to 10,000 people, with each sector providing
administrative, social, educational, health, and other community buildings,
shopping centers, green areas, coªee houses, and mosques (see figs. 4.3 and
4.4). Echoing the social and functionalist logic of the “neighborhood units”
of the post–World War II British New Towns, the plan provided key social
facilities within walking distance, favoring pedestrian movement. Even
though the overall plan emphasized dynamic growth, the size of each sec-
tor was predetermined and the dimensions of each plot, roads, and public

Baghdad’s Urban Restructuring 103

fig. 4.3. Plan of community sector in West Baghdad. From Constantinos A. Doxi-
adis, Architecture in Transition, 109.

fig. 4.4. Model of community sector in West Baghdad. From Constantinos A. Doxi-
adis, Architecture in Transition, 113.
areas within it were also prescribed in an eªort to preserve each sector’s
human scale.
Doxiadis Associates’ logic of functional separation extended to the sys-
tem of social ordering. Each community sector of Western Baghdad would
be broken down into smaller socio-spatial units arranged hierarchically. The
smallest, called “community class I,” would comprise from ten to twenty fam-
ilies of similar income levels. A grouping of three to seven such communi-
ties would comprise a “class II” community, which would also have a
homogenous economic status. House types would also correspond to this
income-based hierarchy, but each promised to provide the basics of sanitation
and safety. The hierarchical logic continued: An agglomeration of class II com-
munities plus an elementary school would be designated as a “class III” com-
munity. Class III communities made up of diªerent income groups, plus a
market and shops, a teahouse and a mosque, could constitute a “class IV”
community, also known as the “community sector” comprising seven thou-
sand to ten thousand individuals. This “community sector” would constitute
“the basic element” of Baghdad’s urban plan, and it was actually a prototype
for the basic element of many of the cities that were subsequently designed.23
Doxiadis Associates’ overall plan for West Baghdad was actually a plan for a
class V community (combining a group of class IV sectors), which would join
other parts of the city to create a class VI community (Baghdad) that would
then join larger regional communities, and so on.
Doxiadis tried to contextualize his abstractions of “scales” and “hierarchies”
by arguing that the smaller class I, II, and III communities corresponded to
community sizes found in Iraqi towns and villages.24 The larger-scale com-
munities, then, were justified as new phenomena that were necessitated by
the advanced transportation and communication technologies of the mod-
ern era. The vision of a multiplicity of communities aimed to provide a cor-
rective to British versions of “self-contained” neighborhoods in New Towns,
which prescribed an optimum size for neighborhoods, and which already were
being criticized for failing to account for people’s increasing dependence on
the automobile and for the new industrial need for the mobility of popula-
tions.25 Doxiadis Associates hoped to introduce some flexibility to the idea
of optimum size by inscribing each community within larger ones. Ironically,
however, the firm continued to be bound by a hierarchical logic that over-
simplified the complexities of the urban environment by assuming that com-
munities and sub-communities could neatly fit into each other, and by too
precipitously accepting the notion of the social and economic harmony of
parts and wholes.

Baghdad’s Urban Restructuring 105

 A similar preoccupation with an e‹cient ordering of the city was reflected
in the way social groups were organized. The small homogeneous residen-
tial communities that Doxiadis Associates defined (class I and II), that would
then interact (on a class III level and beyond) with one another, were meant
to promote the slow and controlled intermixing of social classes and the grad-
ual “development of social balance amongst the several classes of the citi-
zens.”26 This was Doxiadis Associates’ attempt at social engineering, in tune
with the Iraqi regime’s campaign to eliminate sectarian and tribal divisions.
Doxiadis Associates’ proposals, however, remained oblivious to the specific
demographic dynamic of the city (caused, e.g., by the emigration of most
of the city’s Jewish population to Israel after 1947, or the influx of rural pop-
ulations, including many Christians and Kurds from the north and Shi≤as from
the south). For all of the firm’s reports, Doxiadis Associates never acknowl-
edged these transformations and avoided any specific reflection on the city’s
intricate tribal, nomadic, ethnic, and other social formations that created tight
communities inside the city. The proposals were instead confined to vague
references to the “proper” grouping from among diªerent communities that
would allegedly create “a healthy community spirit.”27 A look at the plan gives
us a hint as to what the “proper” grouping of social groups actually meant:
the plan usually called for middle-class housing to be inserted between
upper-income and lower-income neighborhoods, as if to prevent the direct
contact of people from opposite ends of the economic spectrum. Some res-
idential sectors were even separated by “green spaces” that acted as soft bar-
riers between classes. In short, the proposed design strategies had more to
do with an administrative ordering of the society than with any vision of social
equity. Such preoccupation with the rational ordering of both the urban fab-
ric and the society, understood more in visual and aesthetic terms, was typ-
ical of twentieth-century high-modernist urbanism and its grand vision for
the rational engineering of social life.28 The irony, in Doxiadis’s particular
case, is that he had systematically framed Ekistics as an anti-stylistic approach
that deemphasized aesthetics in favor of responding to basic human needs.

local particularity in the functional plan

Certain aspects of the master plan attempted to accommodate local social
habits and formal vocabularies, as if to insert local character into the rational
methodology of housing. One gesture was the introduction of a so-called
gossip square for every grouping of ten to fifteen attached houses. These
squares were to serve as “a modern substitute for the traditional gathering

106 Panayiota Pyla

fig. 4.5. Gossip square in Baghdad. From Ekistics ( June 1958): 281.

places of tribal life,” and would facilitate the transformation of the village
dweller into an urban dweller (see fig. 4.5).29 The gossip square was an idea
that originated with the Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy, who joined the Ekis-
tics group in 1957, and its name was apparently inspired by the observation
that similar loci existed in the traditional neighborhoods of Baghdad and that
these were usually the places where neighborhood women would gather.30
Overlooking the deep-rooted gender stereotyping (not to mention the ori-
entalist bias) that the name “gossip square” implied, the firm embraced the
concept as a planning element that demonstrated its cultural sensitivity. The
strategy was eªective in attracting favorable press. A New York Times report,
for example, argued that the new housing in Baghdad compared favorably
to other modernist interventions:

Iraqi housing authorities, instead of razing the existing slums and erect-
ing tenements on their site, are creating groups of new sub-hamlets in the
adjoining countryside to provide the close family and tribal relationship
the rural Arab knew in his ancestral home. . . . The sub-hamlets are built

Baghdad’s Urban Restructuring 107

 in groups of ten or fifteen small attached houses beside a pedestrian way,
at the end of which is a small gossip square.31

The article went on to praise Doxiadis Associates’ interventions, giving them

an anti-Communist spin! By nurturing a strong sense of community, the arti-
cle claimed, the new housing was combating the void and loneliness felt in
other, unsuccessful urban environments, which were threatening to make
urban dwellers “overly susceptible to conversion by Communist agents.”32
In other words, the desire for harmony and community spirit was intimately
tied to the anxieties of the Cold War.
In addition to the gossip square, the Doxiadis plan also called for the inclu-
sion of hammams and mosques in each sector, and the occasional covered
market with a roof shape reminiscent of the traditional souks. Such gestures,
however, revealed more about the orientalist nostalgia of the plan’s authors
(Why were mosques and hamams the building types singled out?) than they
reflected any profound understanding of Iraqi public life, of the intense het-
erogeneity of its society, or of the inhabitants’ aspirations to modernity. Over-
powered by the plan’s modular functionality, these gossip squares, hamams,
and mosques appeared as mere relics of a past, subsumed by the grand for-
mal and social order of Dynapolis.
A similar criticism could be extended to Doxiadis Associates’ studies of
local climate and formal vocabularies. Climatic conditions were treated
abstractly, in terms of solar exposure, wind patterns, and rainfall data, and
were never really an integral part of the material choices, spatial concep-
tions, or larger design sensibilities of the plan. Doxiadis Associates may have
recognized the open-air courtyard and colonnaded upper gallery as typical
of the region’s residential architecture, but the firm’s own reinterpretation of
these elements in its standardized “house types” pushed such courtyards to
the side or back of each unit, where they lost their original climate benefits
and secluded qualities (see figs. 4.6 and 4.7).33 Similarly, Doxiadis Associates’
attempts to reinterpret traditional wooden window screens with reinforced
concrete produced larger patterns of openings that were not nearly as eªec-
tive in promoting cooling breezes, softening harsh sunlight, or providing a
sense of privacy. This is why, despite all the research and experimentation, in
terms of microclimate, Doxiadis Associates’ housing units compared unfa-
vorably to the old city’s mud huts with their movable roofs.34 In the end, the
courtyards and screens of the old city were compartmentalized in the plans
for the new city into mass production elements. Moreover, the firm’s insis-
tence on attaching specific functional uses to each space—which, inciden-

108 Panayiota Pyla

tally, echoed early modernist preoccupations with functional simplicity and
single-use zoning—overlooked the multiplicity of purposes in domestic space,
failing to recognize, for example, the inhabitant’s tendency to migrate from
room to room, depending on daily and seasonal comfort considerations.35
What ultimately prevailed was an aesthetic imperative of standardization,
which left little opportunity to contemplate a more cultured conception of
the human subject, or to conceive of development itself as a cultural process
tied to place.

conclusion
Despite the Iraqi government’s attempts to secure political stability through
modernization and the nurturing of national pride, a military coup in July
1958, led by General Abd al-Karim al-Qasim, brought about the brutal dep-
osition of the Hashimite monarchy and its replacement by a revolutionary
republic with socialist leanings (until, eventually, a series of coups d’état would
eventually establish the Baath Party as the only legitimate party). In this
new climate, modernization plans changed direction and now emphasized
a more anti-Western version of nationalism that left no room for the kind
of universalism Doxiadis had advanced. By 1959, even local architects like
Makiya and Chadirji, who had previously collaborated with Doxiadis Asso-
ciates, shifted direction toward the valorization of local cultural roots. Under
these circumstances, Doxiadis Associates’ commission was cancelled in May
1959, leaving the Athens-based firm out of the new building boom in Bagh-
dad in the subsequent decade.36 By the time of their departure, however, Dox-
iadis Associates had constructed hundreds of dwelling units (some in western
Baghdad, but also a few on the northeast side of the city and near the Army
Canal)—housing that would set a precedent for many of the firm’s future
projects.37 After Doxiadis Associates’ left Iraq, their master plan for Baghdad
was abandoned, although it occasionally became a reference point for later
proposals. The handful of neighborhoods Doxiadis Associates developed on
the northeast side of the city, for example, became the starting point for an
enormous residential area that expanded along a rectilinear pattern and that
became known as Al Thawra.38
Looking back at the master plan today, one can smile at the naive certainty
of Doxiadis’s predictions for the future, which, for all their comprehensive
claims, failed to account for the impact of war, international trade sanctions,
political and military relationships, and the other geopolitical power dynam-
ics which, we now know, would shape Baghdad’s future. (Even Doxiadis’s

Baghdad’s Urban Restructuring 109

 fig. 4.6. House types in West Baghdad. From Doxiadis Associates, “The Housing
Program of Iraq,” 11–12.

fig. 4.7. Upper-income housing in West Baghdad. From Doxiadis Associates, “The
National Housing Program of Iraq,” 53.
prediction of an ideal population of three million inhabitants grossly under-
estimated the growth of the city, whose population now stands at four and
a half million). One must concede, nonetheless, that for all the pitfalls of Dox-
iadis’s interventions, his firm’s attempt to contemplate the dilemmas of Iraq’s
post-imperialist identity compares favorably when viewed against the rigid
appropriations of the local heritage, as seen in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright
and his orientalized references to the tales of A Thousand and One Nights, or
in the later Baath regime’s populist distortions of the country’s cultural her-
itage that treated concepts of local tradition and heritage as entirely unam-
biguous.39 Despite its flaws, Doxiadis Associates’ plan was significant in
contemplating the role of architecture and planning in the messy reality of
postcolonial nationhood. And, in fact, because of the ironies of his interven-
tion, Doxiadis’s tactics of physical and social restructuring have gained an alto-
gether new relevance today, when new strategies for reconstruction and
nation-building in Iraq are being debated all over again.

notes

This material will appear in a revised version as “Back to the Future: Doxiadis’s
Plans for Baghdad, 1955–58,” in a forthcoming issue (2007–8) of the Journal of
Planning History.
1. For the Iraq Development Board’s funding and its activities at the time, see
Fahim Issa Qubain, The Reconstruction of Iraq: 1950–1957 (New York: F. A. Praeger,
1958), vii, xi; Ishan Fethi, “Contemporary Architecture in Baghdad,” Process
Architecture (May 1985): 112– 32; and Kathleen Langley, The Industrialization of Iraq
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961), 81. For a more recent, criti-
cal discussion of the IDB’s social agenda, see Joseph Siry, “Wright’s Baghdad Opera
House and Gammage Auditorium: In Search of Regional Modernity,” Art Bul-
letin ( June 2005): 365–11.
2. Waldo Bowman, “A Modern Mesopotamia Is Molded,” Engineering News-
Record, December 12, 1957, 34–54.
3. “Development in Iraq: Special Survey,” The Economist 183, no. 5939 ( June
22, 1957): 14–page supplement after p. 1076 [Summary reprinted in Ekistics 5, no.
28 ( January 1958): 45–48.].
4. P. W. Macfarlane, “The Plan for Baghdad, the Capital of Iraq,” Housing
Review 5 (November–December 1956): 193– 95; and Minoprio & Spencely and
P. W. Macfarlane, “Plan for Baghdad, Iraq,” in Architecture in the Middle East, spe-
cial issue of Architectural Design 27 (March 1957): 74– 78.

Baghdad’s Urban Restructuring 111

 5. Doxiadis Associates, “The Master Plan of Baghdad,” Monthly Bulletin 9 ( Jan-
uary 1960).
6. For the IBRD role in Iraq, see World Bank, The Economic Development of Iraq:
Report of a Mission Organized by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Devel-
opment at the Request of the Government of Iraq (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity Press, 1952); and Kahdim al-’Eyd, Oil Revenues and Accelerated Growth:
Absorptive Capacity in Iraq (New York: Praeger, 1979).
7. After receiving the commission in Iraq, Doxiadis Associates was solicited
by many emerging nation-states, and by 1959 Doxiadis’s Athens-based firm had
established branches not only in Baghdad, but also in Karachi, Beirut, Addis Ababa,
Khartoum, and Washington, D.C.
8. As Floyd Ratchford, the American development consultant who collabo-
rated with Doxiadis in Iraq, would put it, Doxiadis “represents something new
on the international ‘technical assistance’ scene.” Later, a New Yorker article would
explain Doxiadis’s success as follows: “Doxiadis has the sort of European abili-
ties that are needed—he is up on the latest planning techniques, and he runs his
firm with northern (or, ‘western’) e‹ciency—but, being a Greek, he is free of
the imperialist stigma” (Christopher Rand, “The Ekistic World,” The New Yorker,
May 11, 1963, 53).
9. Doxiadis had obviously assimilated some of the contemporary architec-
tural debates in Europe and the United States that rejected mechanistic views
and emphasized the multiplicity of human needs, non-functionalist concerns, sen-
timents, emotions, and values. For an overview of the key debates in the Euro-
pean post–World War II architectural scene, see Sarah Williams Goldhagen and
Réjean Legault, eds., Anxious Modernisms (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Archi-
tecture; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000).
10. For Doxiadis’s arguments on the alignments between Ekistics and
international development, see, e.g., “Report by C. A. Doxiadis, Expert, Greece,”
in Mass Housing in Rapidly Developing Tropical and Subtropical Areas (Rotterdam:
International Council for Building Research Studies and Documentation, 1959),
1– 38 and esp. 6– 7.
11. Constantinos A. Doxiadis, “The Science of Ekistics,” Architektoniki 3, no. 13
(1959): 9– 72 (quotation on p. 13).
12. Constantinos A. Doxiadis, “The Rising Tide and the Planner,” Ekistics 7,
no. 39 ( January 1959): 4–10 (quotation on p. 6).
13. Ibid.
14. John Gulick, “Baghdad: Portrait of a City in Physical and Cultural Change,”
Journal of the American Institute of Planners 33, no. 4 (1967): 246–55.
15. For a description of Waziriyah and Rusafah, see Gulick, “Baghdad,” 246,

112 Panayiota Pyla

250. See also John Searles, “City Problems Observed in Iraq, Greece, Germany,”
Journal of Housing (March 1959): 91–94.
16. “Architects Build Modern Baghdad,” Christian Science Monitor, April 2, 1958,
sec. 2. (Summary reprinted in Ekistics 5, no. 32 (May 1958): 244–46.)
17. Fethi, “Contemporary Architecture in Baghdad,” 127. For a more recent
overview of the modernization of Baghdad in this period, see Nicolai Ourous-
soª, “In Search of Baghdad,” Los Angeles Times, December 14–16, 2003.
18. Constantinos A. Doxiadis, “Dynapolis, The City of the Future,” Articles—
Papers/2529, Constantinos A. Doxiadis Archives, Athens, Greece.
19. Linear cities were often mentioned in commentaries about Dynapolis;
see, e.g., Richard Llewelyn-Davis, “Town Design,” Town Planning Review (October
1966), [157]-72.
20. In its later versions, Dynapolis would advance in only one direction, but in
its first Baghdad version, its planned growth was towards two opposite directions.
21. Doxiadis Associates, “The Master Plan of Baghdad,” Monthly Bulletin 9 ( Jan-
uary 1960): 1–8. Doxiadis Associates inserted every city into a grand schema of
a global network of cities that was supposed to establish an equilibrium with the
earth’s natural environment. For a discussion of Doxiadis’s vision of a global urban
network, see Panayiota Pyla, “Gray Areas in Green Politics,” Thresholds 14 (Spring
1997): 48–53 and Panayiota Pyla, “Ecumenopolis, Ecumenokepos, and Doxiadis’s
Environment-Development Politics,” in M. Christine Boyer, Anna Hardman, and
Alexandros-Andreas Kyrtsis, eds., Space and Progress: Constantinos Doxiadis’s Ekis-
tics and the Global Context of Post World War II Planning, Architecture, Urbanization
and Reconstruction (Springer, forthcoming).
22. See, for example, “The Master Plan of Baghdad” and “The Housing Pro-
gram of Iraq” (1959) (Constantinos A. Doxiadis Archives, Athens, Greece), espe-
cially the section titled “The Program for Urban Amelioration.” For similar views
expressed by other planning experts, see Floyd Ratchford and Bleeker Marquette,
“Tale of Two Countries: Spain, Iraq,” Journal of Housing 16 ( January 1959): 8–12,
18; and P. W. Macfarlane, “The Plan for Baghdad, the Capital of Iraq,” Housing
Review 5 (November–December 1956): 193–95.
23. “The National Housing Program of Iraq.” Architectoniki 13 ( January–
February 1959): 42–46.
24. Constantinos A. Doxiadis, “Architecture, Planning, and Ekistics: Abstract
of the Third Part of a Lecture Series Given at the Massachusetts Institute of Tech-
nology, Spring 1957,” Ekistics 7, no. 42 (April 1959): 293–96.
25. Doxiadis’s close colleague, Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, pointed to the pitfalls of
the New Towns and to the advantages of Doxiadis’s reinterpretation of neigh-
borhood units; see Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, “Outline of Background Paper for Expert

Baghdad’s Urban Restructuring 113

Group Meeting on Planning and Development of Satellite and New Towns, 1964,”
Harvard Loeb Library Documents, Graduate School of Design, Harvard Uni-
versity. For the broader, U.N. debates on the New Towns, see United Nations,
Planning of Metropolitan Areas and New Towns (New York: United Nations, 1967).
For a summary of the criticism that surrounded the British New Towns in the
1950s, see Stanley Buder, Visionaries and Planners (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1990), 187–89.
26. Doxiadis Associates, “Iraq Housing Program,” Doxiadis Associates Pam-
phlet, no. 5, September 1959.
27. Ibid.
28. The pitfalls of High Modernist urbanism and its technocratic utopianism
are insightfully exposed in James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1998).
29. “Tribal Housing in Iraq,” Special to the New York Times from Baghdad,
Iraq, May 14, 1958; abstracted in Ekistics 5, no. 33 ( June 1958): 280–82.
30. For an analysis of Fathy’s collaboration with Doxiadis in Iraq and else-
where, see Panayiota Pyla, “Hassan Fathy Revisited: Postwar Discourses on Sci-
ence Development, and Vernacular Architecture,” Journal of Architectural Education
60:3 (February 2007): 23–29.
31. Ibid. For other examples of the positive reception to Doxiadis’s Baghdad
project, see B. S. Saini, “Housing in the Hot and Arid Tropics,” Design 5 (August
1961): 18–24; and Ezra Ehrenhrantz and Ogden Tanner, “The Remarkable Dr.
Doxiadis,” Architectural Forum 114, no. 5 (May 1961): 112–16.
32. “Tribal Housing in Iraq,” 280.
33. See, e.g., Hassan Fathy, Aris Deimezis, Nikos Kyriou, and A. Marinos, “Ther-
mal Comfort,” April 15, 1958, 1–2, document R-GA 108, Doxiadis Associates (Fathy
Archives), Athens; and Doxiadis Associates, “A Regional Development Program
for Greater Mussayib, Iraq, 1958,” Ekistics 6, no. 36 (October 1958): 149–86.
34. Gulick, “Baghdad,” 252.
35. Fethi, “Contemporary Architecture in Baghdad,” 117.
36. In the 1960s, local firms took a huge volume of work, and after the cre-
ation of the first School of Architecture in Iraq, in 1959, the number of local pro-
fessionals grew dramatically.
37. A summary of the buildings that were completed appears in Doxiadis Asso-
ciates, “Progress of the Housing Program,” Monthly Report 46, prepared for the
Government of the Republic of Iraq (Athens, May 1959). Also see Gulick, “Bagh-
dad,” 253.
38. Under Saddam Hussein, this area became infamous for the poverty and
misery of the mostly Shia inhabitants, but it would be unfair to blame that on

114 Panayiota Pyla

Doxiadis Associates’ plans and not on the regime’s own negligence toward its
citizens.
39. For Wright’s proposals for Baghdad, see Siry, “Wright’s Baghdad Opera
House and Gammage Auditorium”; and Neil Levine, The Architecture of Frank
Lloyd Wright (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996). For a reflection
on Saddam Hussein’s interventions in the 1980s, see William Brantley, “The Search
for Baghdad,” Urban Land 63 (2004): 49–55.

Baghdad’s Urban Restructuring 115

5 Democracy, Development, and the Americanization
of Turkish Architectural Culture in the 1950S
sibel bozdoğ an

W ith the landslide election victory of the Democrat Party (DP)

on May 14, 1950, Turkey’s early republican period came to a deci-
sive end. Abandoning the secular authoritarianism, statist eco-
nomic policies, and nationalist isolationism of the Republican Peoples’ Party
during the previous two decades, the DP regime promoted populist democ-
racy, private enterprise, and a more ambitious regional role for Turkey in the
post–World War II international order. Sending 15,000 troops to the Korean
War (and suªering a total of 3,514 casualties) was a price the new regime was
willing to pay in order to join the American-led Western alliance in a sharply
divided Cold War world. The foundational, Western-oriented cultural poli-
tics of the nation (as established by the national hero Kemal Ataturk in the
1930s) continued into this new period, but the meaning of “Western” shifted
considerably, from “European” to “American.” Two major American exports,
namely, “modernization theory” in the social sciences and the “international
style” in architecture, began to shape perceptions of democracy, modernity,
and the “good life” in Turkey. At the same time, after two decades of relative
insignificance in the shadow of the new capital of Ankara, the old imperial
capital of Istanbul enjoyed a spectacular revival under the new DP regime
and became the showcase for massive urban modernization projects.
These shifts in Turkish culture and politics were far from smooth, nor did
they occur without resistance. The traditional republican elites (the military,
the bureaucracy, and the Kemalist intelligentsia) resented the new economic

116
policies of the DP government, which depended on agricultural exports and
foreign aid and replaced the earlier ideals of national self-su‹ciency and indus-
trialization through the agency of the state. Nor were the ambitions of the
DP entirely free of ambiguities. The DP slogan, of turning Turkey into “a
little America,” was accompanied by an equally strong ambition to turn Turkey
into an important regional power in the Eastern Mediterranean, with strong
ties to other Muslim countries of the Middle East. In fact, Turkey’s textbook
case of internationalization and modernization was accompanied, in the
o‹cial discourse of the time, by a seemingly contradictory renewal of
nationalist and religious themes. The homogenization of Turkish society
(through the departure of ethnic minorities) accelerated under the DP
regime, and many of the early republican restrictions on religious expression
were lifted, in what amounted to a populist reclamation of the Islamic/
Ottoman heritage of the nation. Such relaxation of the radical secularism of
the early republic, although gaining conservative, popular support for the DP,
antagonized the republican elites, who saw themselves as the guardians of
Kemalist reforms against Islamic reactionaries—a conflict which, to this day,
has proven to be endemic to Turkish society and politics.1
In this essay, I oªer a broad overview of how Turkish architectural cul-
ture positioned itself, in the 1950s, between international architectural cur-
rents and the specific circumstances of national modernization in Turkey—of
how the imported high-modernism of the post–World War II period acquired
specific meanings within the political context of Turkey under the DP gov-
ernment. I suggest that rather than being the passive recipients of an imported
aesthetic, Turkish architects became active participants in the localization and
naturalization of an “international style,” transforming both their professional
culture and local building practices as a result.

national modernization and international style

To understand the internationalization (read Americanization) of Turkish
architectural culture in the 1950s, it is important to begin with the concept
of modernization as it was articulated by American social scientists and “area
studies” experts. In Daniel Lerner’s classic study titled The Passing of Tradi-
tional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (1962), and in other similar books
(such as Bernard Lewis’s The Emergence of Modern Turkey [1961]), Turkey was
heralded as one of the most successful models of a universally defined process
of modernization better known as “modernization theory.” Central to mod-
ernization theory was a basic dichotomy between modernity and tradition,

The Americanization of Turkish Architectural Culture 117

in which the former was presented as an unambiguous blessing and the lat-
ter as an obstacle to its realization. It was postulated that as societies became
more “modern”—through increased literacy, increased mobility, a new spirit
of enterprise, the use of communication technologies, urbanization, and other
such indicators—their traditional traits and cultural practices such as fatal-
ism, religion, and a lack of curiosity about the world would give way to new
patterns of thought and behavior that would be largely derived from the insti-
tutions and values of American society. That these predictions proved to be
mistaken—that, for example, increased mobility and urbanization resulted
in a strengthening rather than slackening of religious practices in Turkey, did
not change the fact that America was perceived as the ideal democratic soci-
ety by the followers of DP, including religious and traditional Turks who
admired the freedom of religious expression in America as an alternative to
the much-resented radical secularism of the Kemalist revolution.2
The extensive fieldwork and empirical research methods employed by the
proponents of “modernization theory” were particularly eªective in lending
a scientific aura to what Frederic Jameson sees as a euphemism for the pen-
etration of capitalism.3 In Daniel Lerner’s book, for example, based on his
studies in Balgat, a Turkish village near Ankara, and conducted between 1950
and 1954, the transition from traditional to modern society is equated with
consumerism and entrepreneurship: it required individuals who were no
longer content with older values of self-su‹ciency. The ability to imagine
oneself as someone else or as being somewhere else, especially in America,
was a major criterion distinguishing the “moderns” from the “traditionals”—
something that Daniel Lerner tabulated in the form of an “empathy index.”
Lerner wrote: “Empathy endows a person with the capacity to imagine him-
self as the proprietor of a bigger grocery store in the city, to wear nice clothes
and live in a nice house, to be interested in what is going on in the world and
to get out of his hole.”4 Furthermore, the more traditional societies changed
along these lines, the happier and more in control of their destinies they were
supposed to feel—a relationship that Lerner expressed in his so-called “dys-
phoria index.”
Whatever our qualms about quantifying happiness, or about moderniza-
tion theory in general, Turkey’s future seemed bright in 1950. Owing to that
country’s strategic importance for the American policy of containing Com-
munism and Soviet expansion during the Cold War, Turkey was included in
the Marshall Plan of 1947 and admitted to NATO in 1952. American govern-
mental and private agencies channeled generous packages of development aid
and technical assistance to Turkey so as to modernize its agricultural and indus-

118 Sibel Bozdovan

trial production and its transportation network. This does not mean that Amer-
icanization and “modernization theory” were accepted wholesale across the
political spectrum. The oppositional theories of “dependency,” “American
imperialism,” and “arrested development” that would inform the ill-fated Turk-
ish Left for the next two decades were all rooted in these socioeconomic shifts
of the 1950s. For example, Niyazi Berkes, a prominent intellectual and a lead-
ing critic of the inequalities of the capitalist world system, argued that the real
objective of American aid through the Marshall Plan was not to help Turkey
develop its own economy in a planned fashion; rather, it was to help with the
reconstruction of Europe, by subordinating the Turkish economy to Europe’s,
as a supplier of agricultural products and raw materials, and by eliminating
all the Kemalist obstacles to foreign capital and private enterprise.5
Nevertheless, the fact that in the first few years of its rule the DP was able
to deliver a brief “economic miracle” (largely due to the specific conditions
of the Korean War, a boom in agricultural exports, and favorable foreign-
exchange rates) oªered ample grounds for optimism in the early 1950s. That
Turkey was admitted to the “Western club” for geopolitical reasons, rather
than as a result of any real acceptance of the need for cultural integration
was not an issue for either side in the 1950s.6 For a brief euphoric period, iden-
tity and diªerence were rendered irrelevant by geopolitics, and architects were
ready to celebrate this. Although the centrality of the nation-state as the pri-
mary agent of modernization remained unchallenged, Turkish architects
now abandoned the search for a “Turkish national style” and dropped their
earlier misgivings about the term “international style.” With a new sense of
belonging to an international community of modern nations, they embraced
the new supranational aesthetic of bureaucratic and technocratic e‹ciency
(as best symbolized by the recently completed U.N. Building in New York),
which eschewed any cultural references to any particular nation and sought
to evoke a happier, democratic, and hopefully wealthier future for all.
The canonic Istanbul Hilton Hotel (1952–55), designed by Skidmore,
Owings and Merrill (SOM) with Sedad Hakki Eldem as the local collaborat-
ing architect, is the indisputable marker of this major ideological and aes-
thetic shift in Turkish architectural culture, as well as the textbook case of
modern architecture’s role in Cold War politics (see fig. 5.1). A prime loca-
tion overlooking the Bosporus was allocated to the Hilton project by the Turk-
ish government, and the construction was publicly financed by the Turkish
Pension Funds (Emekli Sandıvı). Additional funds came from the Economic
Cooperation Administration (ECA) of the U.S. government, which saw the
project, whose location bordered the Soviet Union, as a political and strate-

The Americanization of Turkish Architectural Culture 119

fig. 5.1. Model of the Istanbul Hilton Hotel. Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, with Sed-
dad Hakki Eldem, 1952–55. From Arkitekt, no. 3–4 (1952): 59.

gic investment. As Annabel Wharton and others have observed, to enter the
Istanbul Hilton was to gain admission to “a little America,” the paradigm of
benevolent and democratic capitalist society that the DP regime embraced
as its model.7 In terms of its political, economic, and social implications, the
Hilton project generated significant national debate and even opposition at
the time. Yet few would disagree with the fact that its design and construc-
tion opened up a new direction and a period of experimentation in modern
Turkish architecture, releasing it from the ideological charge of national
expression and from the earlier obsession with “Turkishness.”
Using the Istanbul Hilton’s catalytic role in the transformation of mod-
ern Turkish architecture as a starting point, the first general observation I
want to make in this essay is that the feelings of “optimism” and “imagina-
tion” that are central to modernization theory deserve more attention than
they typically receive in critical histories of modern architecture— especially
as they provide a countervailing weight for the term “anxiety” that Sarah Gold-
hagen and Rejean Legault have employed to characterize post–World War II
modernism.8 It is only when one looks beyond the West and toward the decol-
onizing and modernizing nation-states of the Middle East, Asia, and Latin

120 Sibel Bozdovan

America that one can clearly see this brief moment of optimism attached to
the aesthetic and ideological precepts of international style, and precisely at
the same time that these ideas were beginning to be questioned in Europe
and the United States.
The optimism and democratic connotations of an imported moderniza-
tion theory were not the only factors favorable to the internationalization of
Turkish architectural culture in the 1950s. Equally important was the fact that
the Turkish state had largely succeeded in homogenizing the society and cre-
ating a national bourgeoisie, thereby removing a major motivation for the
search for a distinctly “Turkish” national style. With the departure of Greek,
Armenian, Levantine, and other minorities,9 the mass migration of Turkish
peasants into major cities, and the resulting ethnic homogenization of the
population, the Turkishness of the nation was no longer contested: it could
now be taken for granted. Hence, expressing Turkishness through architec-
ture was no longer an urgent need: it was superseded by the desire to adopt
the supranational language of modernism and technological progress as visual
testimonies to the success of Turkish national modernization in the interna-
tional arena. Most Turkish architects were still committed nationalists,
despite the aesthetic shifts in their work, but nationalism was no longer a mat-
ter of style to be derived from historical or vernacular precedents. Rather, it
was a matter of national pride in the internationalization and increased com-
petence of the profession—in the increasing domination in construction
projects by Turkish, rather than foreign, architects.10
The most prominent of these architects was Sedad Hakki Eldem, the
powerful leader of the “national architecture movement” of the 1930s and
40s, who surprised everyone by “going international” in the 1950s.11 I would
argue that the now-famous collaboration between SOM’s Gordon Bunshaft
and Sedad Eldem, during the design and construction of the Hilton Hotel,
actually made a bigger impression on the latter than he would ever admit.
Although in later, revisionist accounts of his own career, Eldem has denounced
the international style of the 1950s, he produced some of his most interest-
ing work during this brief period—work that has often been left out of the
more canonical accounts of his career, which prefer to focus on his lifelong
search for a national style along the lines of the traditional Turkish house.
In Eldem’s partially built scheme for a motel and beach facilities in Flo-
rya, Istanbul (1956–59), for example, he unapologetically displays the inter-
national influences of the post-Hilton years. His use of a reinforced concrete
structure with thin, pre-cast concrete slabs, wide cantilevers, and an overall
feeling of lightness, especially in the perspective renderings of the beach

The Americanization of Turkish Architectural Culture 121

facilities, has prompted historians to detect the influence of Richard Neutra,
among others.12 This is a plausible assumption, given the popularity of Neu-
tra’s work among Turkish architects and students in the 1950s.13 A better-known
and better-preserved testimony to the “internationalist” phase of Eldem’s
career is the villa for Rıza Derviî on Büyükada (largest of the Prince Islands)
in Istanbul, built in 1956–57. The open plan of the villa that allows for a merg-
ing of interior and exterior on the garden level, the light, reinforced concrete
structure with its wide cantilevering terrace projecting above the ground floor,
and the absence of the traditional pitched roof collectively mark the most
conspicuous departure in Eldem’s residential work from his signature “Turk-
ish house type.” At the same time, the interior still suggests continuity with
Eldem’s earlier ideas on the compatibility of traditional Turkish wohnkultur
with modernism: the fireplace as the modern hearth, built-in components,
light furniture, and, most conspicuously, the stylized, abstract tile patterns
that Eldem designed for the Hilton Hotel and used repeatedly thereafter.
The same post-Hilton tendencies can be observed in the 1950s work of
Emin Onat, the other leading proponent of the “national architecture move-
ment,” along with Sedad Eldem and Paul Bonatz—the three of them having
collaborated in a number of nationalist state monuments of the 1940s.
Onat’s shift from his Germanic architectural culture of the previous decade
to an American/Internationalist one coincided with his brief, and ultimately
disastrous, political career as a DP deputy after 1954. Eldem and Onat set the
paradigm for the early republican architect whose professional identity was
intimately tied to the ideology of the nation-state. Like them, almost all prac-
ticing architects of the 1930s and 1940s were either educators working within
the architectural and engineering schools, or salaried government employ-
ees working within the planning and technical units of various government
ministries: railway stations were designed by the Ministry of Transportation;
schools by the Ministry of Education, and so on (which also accounts for a
certain degree of aesthetic uniformity in these buildings). Given their strong
ties to the state, it is not surprising that Eldem and Onat were quick to align
themselves with the new regime after 1950, and to oªer their services for its
new architectural and urban initiatives.
It was, however, the advent of an entirely new, younger generation of archi-
tects whose careers coincided with the new commitment to international style
that brought a significant organizational transformation of professional
practice. Although the practice of providing major public architectural and
planning services within the state bureaucracy continued during the DP
government, the emergence of private clients, especially for residential and

122 Sibel Bozdovan

commercial buildings, coupled with the broader emphasis on the role of the
private sector in Turkey’s new development strategies, facilitated the emer-
gence of what architectural historians consider to be the first truly “private”
architectural firms and the first major “partnership” models.14 Some of the
most prominent architectural practices/partnerships of modern Turkish
architecture emerged in this period, such as the partnership of Haluk Baysal
and Melih Birsel, which has produced residential designs of very high qual-
ity reflecting the international trends of the 1950s. In 1954 the Turkish Cham-
ber of Architects was established (with 720 members) as a licensing and
regulating body, a‹rming the profession’s autonomy and independence from
the state. These structural changes in practice constitute an important back-
drop to the aesthetic transformation of modernism in the 1950s.

corporate american style meets “mediterranean

modern”
The primary role of America in the internationalization of the profession
in Turkey in the 1950s is amply documented. In his recently published semi-
autobiographical work, Architectural Anthology of the 1950s Generation, Enis Kor-
tan remembers how his fascination with the “American modern” was
triggered by a special 1953 issue of L’Architecture d’aujour d’hui, on “American
Architecture,” a copy of which he kept with him at all times.15 This fascina-
tion, Kortan writes, especially his “mesmerizing encounter with Mies Van
der Rohe’s Fransworth House,” was an important factor in luring him and a
number of his friends to America, to see these modern marvels and seek work
in the o‹ces of SOM, Marcel Breuer, Saarinen and Yamasaki, among others.
News items and announcements in the professional journal Arkitekt also reveal
that in the 1950s summer training programs and various exchanges were
oªered to Turkish architects and engineers by the U.S. government through
Fulbright grants. Furthermore, these exchanges were not one-sided: in 1956
the Americanization of Turkish architectural culture became even more
o‹cial with the establishment of a new school of architecture in Ankara, as
one of the first components of the Middle East Technical University. The Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania was among the founders of the school, and its com-
mittee, headed by G. Holmes Perkins, played a major role in mediating
between the Turkish and U.S. governments.16 The school’s curriculum and
orientation were conspicuously “American,” breaking away from the earlier
influence of Germans on architectural education in Turkey.
Yet to characterize the emerging aesthetic tendencies of the post-Hilton

The Americanization of Turkish Architectural Culture 123

years as exclusively “American” would be to overlook the plurality of “inter-
national style” in the 1950s. Indeed, even the Istanbul Hilton did not repre-
sent the paradigmatic “American corporate modern” of SOM, as exemplified
by their canonic Lever House in New York. Rather, the hotel was drawn from
the work of Le Corbusier, with its use of a reinforced concrete frame, hori-
zontally proportioned block, pilotis, and a roof terrace. The precedent for this
signature “Hilton style,” or the “tropicalization of modernism,” was the Caribe
Hilton, in San Juan, Puerto Rico. That hotel, completed in 1949, was designed
by Torro, Ferrer and Torregrosa, and it appeared in Arkitekt two years before
the Istanbul Hilton did. Overall, the architectural production of the 1950s in
Turkey displays varying degrees of influence between the two basic archi-
tectural “types” prevailing in the architectural culture at large: the two-sided,
egg-crate block displaying the grid of the reinforced concrete frame, after
“the Hilton style”; or the glass-curtain wall “draped” in front of the structural
frame, after the American o‹ce tower epitomized by the Lever House.
Given the limitations of technical expertise within the Turkish building
industry, it is not surprising that high-rise towers clad in glass-curtain walls
remained a formidable technological challenge in Turkey until much later—
with the single proud exception, perhaps, of Ankara’s so-called “Skyscraper”
(Gökdelen), designed by Enver Tokay and built between 1959 and 1964. Indis-
putably, the more common paradigm was the Hilton’s horizontally placed
slab-block, raised on pilotis and expressing the logic of the reinforced con-
crete frame on its façade grid—a formula that was repeated in numerous
hotels, apartments, and o‹ce buildings of the time. There were also a num-
ber of important in-between works, which used the glass-curtain wall in con-
junction with the basic two-sided prismatic block lifted on pilotis and topped
with the characteristic Corbusean roof. The Anadolu Club Building on
Büyükada (Prince Island) in Istanbul, the winner of a major national compe-
tition in 1959, is the most notable and refined example of this hybrid idea.
Designed by the uncompromising and very important Turkish modernist
architect, Abdurrahman Hanci, in collaboration with Turgut Cansever (who
would later abandon international-style modernism for regionalist expres-
sions and Islamist philosophies), the Anadolu Club consists of a three-story
main block raised upon a transparent ground level and topped at the roof
level with a conspicuously Corbusean “parasol” (see fig. 5.2).
One particularly characteristic detail of the 1950s aesthetic was the use
of perforated bricks or pre-cast concrete grills for the circulation shafts or
exterior corridors, which worked both as sunscreens and decorative façade
elements. In the post–World War II years, these characteristic devices for

124 Sibel Bozdovan

fig. 5.2. Anadolu Club, Büyükada, Istanbul (1951–57), by Abdurrahman Hanci and
Turgut Cansever. From Arkitekt, no. 295 (1959): 50.

“aestheticized light and climate control” were distinct features of a prolific,

“tropicalized” or “Mediterraneanized” modernism, from the Caribbean to
the Middle East and beyond. Examples of this style, in the work of Ed Stone
and Joseph Stein in India, or Walter Gropius and Josep Lluis Sert in Baghdad,
were particularly appealing to Turkish architects, especially in the context of
Turkey’s stated ambitions to be a regional power in the Eastern Mediter-
ranean. Many Turkish architects acknowledge these international influences
in their published writings and interviews, whereas references to the more
“orientalist,” or culturally tinted, styles of Islamic architecture, such as the
traditional wooden grill, or mashrabiyya, are far less common. This is an impor-
tant point in diªerentiating the “ localization” eªorts of the 1950s from the
discourses of identity and cultural diªerence that emerged much later. In the
1950s, the terms “culture” and “ locality” largely signified climate, terrain, and
geography.
Even when orientalist evocations were to a certain extent inevitable, as in
the case of hotels, the inspiration for the use of curves and non-orthogonal
forms (such as shells, domes, vaults, and spirals, which in the 1950s were fre-
quently used in conjunction with the geometric grid of the façades) was
derived more from international references than oriental ones. Hilton Hotel
is again the paradigmatic example. Orientalizing interpretations dominate
most accounts of Hilton’s auxiliary structures, designed by Sedad Hakki
Eldem (see figs. 5.3, 5.4): the roof of the pool restaurant is associated with
the domes of Ottoman mosques; the curving entrance canopy is nicknamed
“the flying carpet,” and many commentators make a point of highlighting
their visual contrast with the geometry of the reinforced concrete frame.
These allusions to the “sensuous curves” of the Orient (in both the popular
media and the architects’ own statements at the time) are undoubtedly use-
ful for attracting tourism, but they also obscure the fact that architects

The Americanization of Turkish Architectural Culture 125

fig. 5.3. Istanbul Hilton Hotel pool restaurant. Sedad Hakki Eldem.

fig. 5.4. Entrance canopy of Istanbul Hilton Hotel. From Architectural Forum, Decem-
ber 1953.
looked at such shell structures and parabolic vaults primarily as the latest and
most progressive technological innovations of international modernism. In
most cases, their sources of inspiration were more Niemeyer and Nervi than
mosques and flying carpets. For example, Eldem’s pool restaurant for the
Hilton is much less evocative of Istanbul’s domes than it is of a very similar
restaurant at the “La Concha” Hotel (literally, the “Seashell” Hotel) in San
Juan, Puerto Rico, designed, once again, by Torro, Ferrer and Torregrosa. This
form was simply a recurring element built into the vocabulary of interna-
tional hotel design in the 1950s.
Other building types with comparable programmatic requirements (such
as o‹ces and apartment blocks) also adopted this distinctive aesthetic trope
of the 1950s, juxtaposing the geometric grid of the main block (with identi-
cal cells for o‹ces or apartment units) with a singular and more sculptural
shell structure to cover restaurants, assembly halls, or other non-repetitive
components of the program. In one of the most significant competitions of
the post-Hilton years, Nevzat Erol’s winning design for the Istanbul City Hall
(1953) employed this same formula (see fig. 5.5). A parabolic cross-vault
marked the roof of the assembly hall in front of the main block, and another,
single parabolic shell and a thin, curving slab covered the roof restaurant.
Another innovative use of a parabolic vault is Vedat Dalokay’s unbuilt compe-
tition project for the Kocatepe Mosque in Ankara (1957), which reinterprets
the classical Ottoman mosque with an innovative thin-shell concrete struc-
ture touching the ground on four supports. This important project testifies
to the fact that, in the 1950s, rather than trying to orientalize new buildings by
making allusions to mosques, Turkish architects sought to modernize them,
even for the case of a traditional “oriental” building type like the mosque.
Whether it is the aesthetic of the reinforced concrete frame or the more
sculptural form of the shell or vault accompanying it, the most significant build-
ings of the 1950s in Turkey were conceived as “modern monuments” to adorn
Istanbul—singular objects that made a statement about the new DP regime’s
commitment to modernize and beautify the city. What is often overlooked in
any discussion of Istanbul’s “international-style” buildings is that their conno-
tations of newness, optimism, and modernity were further accentuated by their
particular location and its relationship to its surroundings. Under the personal
direction of the Turkish prime minister, Adnan Menderes, the DP regime made
the modernization of Istanbul one of its most publicized political priorities.
In what many historians have called a “populist public relations campaign,”
large avenues were cut through the city fabric and entire areas were cleared
around Ottoman monuments to highlight the historical and tourism poten-

The Americanization of Turkish Architectural Culture 127

tial of the city.17 At the same time, the “modern monuments” of international
style were placed as new and highly visible landmarks—for example, on a hill-
top within a public park (the Hilton Hotel), at a busy intersection (City Hall),
or along a new coastal road connecting the city to the airport (the Çınar Hotel).
Their “international” architectural styles notwithstanding, most were strate-
gically situated “Istanbul buildings,” acquiring their meaning from the city
itself—something that has been overlooked by later condemnations of “inter-
national style” as a generic, placeless architecture that disregards context.

democratizing modernism: house as shelter or luxury?

It was, however, the translation of the multistory, slab-block type from such
singular modern monuments to the realm of urban housing that gave the archi-
tecture of the 1950s its distinct visual character. Whereas in the early repub-
lic the paradigm of the modern house was the single-family villa within a
garden, after 1950 Turkey’s rapid urbanization and the concomitant housing
shortage led to the emergence of designs for apartment blocks that adapted
the same international aesthetic of the reinforced concrete frame. The par-
adigmatic Ataköy Cooperative Development, in Istanbul, built along the
coastal road to the airport, was one of the first experiments undertaken uti-
lizing long-term credits from the newly established Emlak Bank. Consisting
of diªerent types of medium- and high-rise apartment blocks spaciously
arranged in a park according to a site plan by the Italian architect Luigi Pic-
cinato, the Ataköy experiment symbolized the new standards of modern liv-
ing. Designed by various Turkish architects, the Ataköy apartments are to
this day quite successful architecturally as examples of reinforced concrete,
high-rise blocks with aestheticized climate-control devices, roof terraces,
and spacious units (see fig. 5.6). Nonetheless, as many commentators have
observed, they have fallen short in responding to the housing needs of the
urban poor, catering instead to the wealthier, upper-middle classes.
The Ataköy case illustrates what appears to be the defining paradox of
Turkish architectural culture in the 1950s: namely, the conflict between a
socially concerned interest in housing as the central question of modern
democracies, and an aesthetic preoccupation with the idea of the dwelling
as a designed product to house modern lifestyles. If we return to the Hilton
Hotel for a moment, we can read the same paradox into its famous “honey-
comb façade,” as Architectural Forum called it in 1953. On one hand, the stack-
ing of identical units (whether hotel rooms, o‹ces, or apartments) was
evocative of a democratic e‹ciency—that is to say, everyone gets the same

128 Sibel Bozdovan

fig. 5.5. Istanbul City Hall. Nevzat Erol, 1953.

cell. On the other, the interior of the hotel room signified American notions
of modern comfort, consumption, and living the “good life” through tech-
nological amenities: air conditioning, private baths, hot water, wall-to-wall
carpeting, and a radio cabinet in every room. This paradoxical and distinctly
American ideal of democratizing comfort and luxury permeated the entire
discourse on “the modern home” in the 1950s. In the pages of Arkitekt, “Exis-
tenzminimum” and the “Neue Sachlichkeit” were out; large kitchens with
electric appliances, dishwashers, refrigerators, and a family-dining corner were
in. Architectural and popular magazines of the time are full of articles on
American homes, many of them translated from American journals through
the agency of the U.S. Information Services in Istanbul.18 The role of USIS
in translating American foreign policy and strategic goals into cultural prop-
aganda, and the complicity of Arkitekt in this process, is an important topic,
but one beyond the scope of this essay.19
At the same time, in the discourse of modernization and development,
also introduced to Turkey by American social scientists, experts, and plan-
ners, the house was seen not so much as a consumer object that could pro-
vide the good life, but rather as a basic need—as shelter. Charles Abrams, the
prominent planner and housing expert who later published Man’s Struggle for
Shelter in an Urbanizing World,20 came to Turkey on a research trip in 1951 and
later prepared a report for the United Nations on the conditions and prob-
lems of housing and urbanization in Turkey. That same year, another report
on housing, planning, and building construction was prepared for the Turk-

The Americanization of Turkish Architectural Culture 129

ish government by an SOM team led by the same Gordon Bunshaft who would
design the Hilton Hotel the following year.21 Throughout the 1950s, the need
for urban housing, especially in response to the massive migration to the cities
from the countryside, remained a monumental social, economic, and polit-
ical challenge for the DP government. Just to cite some figures: Turkey’s urban
population, which grew by 20.1 percent in the decade 1940–50, reached a
growth rate of 80.2 percent between 1950 and 1960.22
Although ultimately ineªective against the magnitude of the housing prob-
lem, the care that at least some architects put into reconciling the conflict-
ing demands of housing large numbers of people, while at the same time
creating a sense of aesthetic refinement and conceptual experimentation, was
unmatched for a long time afterward. Particularly noteworthy is the work of
Haluk Baysal and Melih Birsel, which, as Ela Kacel analyzes in detail, was able
to transform international modernism into a non-canonic, “ordinary” resi-
dential architecture that is today hardly discernable from the surrounding
urban fabric.23 In their most characteristic work, Baysal and Birsel have taken
the basic multistory slab block and have experimented with its sections to
create duplex units stacked within the main grid of the reinforced concrete
frame—not unlike Le Corbusier’s conception of the Unité d’Habitation. Fur-
thermore, they have elaborated this idea into a flexible schema that can accom-
modate considerable typological variation in diªerent projects. For example,
in the apartment block for the Lawyers’ Cooperative, in Mecidiyeköy, Istan-
bul (1960–61), instead of the usual two-sided, freestanding matchbox, they
have stacked twelve stories of duplex units within an L-shaped arrangement
(one wing perpendicular to the street and the other parallel to it), thereby
giving expression to the corner condition on the exterior of the building (see
fig. 5.7). In a later project, in Yeîilköy, a suburb of Istanbul, the same idea of
manipulating the section to create duplex units was repeated, this time by
transforming the corridor into an open-to-the-sky, two-level interior street,
resulting in one of the most interesting, but understudied housing schemes
of modern Turkish architecture (see figs. 5.8, 5.9).
Collectively, the more refined examples of 1950s apartment blocks illus-
trate that once the basic “type” was established (i.e., the prismatic, two-sided
slab block, often raised on pilotis), the aesthetization of modernism was
largely a matter of façade design. In contrast to the characteristically early
republican preoccupation with volumetric compositions, architects in the
1950s engaged in a “surfacing of modernism”—a treating of the façade as a
form of “modern decoration” expressing the programmatic and structural
properties of the building.24 On this topic, an article by Frederick Gibberd,

130 Sibel Bozdovan

fig. 5.6. Ataköy Cooperative Housing development, Istanbul.

fig. 5.7. Apartment

block for Lawyers’ Coop-
erative in Mecidiyeköy,
Istanbul. Haluk Baysal
and Melih Birsel,
1960–61.
fig. 5.8. Low-rise, high-density housing in Yeîilköy. Haluk Baysal and Melih Birsel.

fig. 5.9. Concrete grid with infill in the Yeîilköy apartment block. Haluk Baysal and
Melih Birsel.
titled “Expression in Modern Architecture” (Modern Mimaride Ifade) was
reprinted in Arkitekt in 1953 (translated from Architects’ Journal). As the Turk-
ish historian Ali Cegizkan compellingly illustrates in his book, the article was
received with great interest in the Turkish architectural scene.25 Not only
in hotels and o‹ce buildings, but also in the newly emerging typology of
urban apartment buildings for the middle class, the reinforced concrete frame
was used as a grid to be filled in with a geometric composition of glazed
areas, brick or plastered infill walls, wooden or concrete grills, and/or can-
tilevering balconies (see fig. 5.10). Contrary to Sedad Hakki Eldem’s subse-
quent dismissal of the period, as producing “buildings that looked like boxes,
drawers or radios,”26 this “surfacing of modernism,” or the celebration of
the reinforced concrete frame, has produced considerable aesthetic quality
and variety.

conclusion
As many critics have pointed out,27 modernization theory was the work of
American social scientists and “area studies” experts, who oªered an academic
foundation to the expansion of American political, military, and economic
interests throughout the world in the aftermath of World War II. Yet the pos-
itive psychological eªect of this theory on the emerging nations of the post-
colonial world was enormous, giving them grounds to hope that although
historical and cultural diªerences separated them from the experiences of
the industrialized West, they too could “make it” one day, by following this
linear, predictable, and “scientific” model of development. Whereas the older
colonialist/orientalist constructs that were based on essentialist cultural cat-
egories suggested a built-in inferiority, modernization theory defined a uni-
versal process that applied to all societies. For architects, modernization theory
played a progressive role in replacing nationalist obsessions with identity with
a focus on the real and trans-national problems of modernization—like devel-
opment, urbanism, housing, construction, and infrastructure.
Before the end of the decade of the 1950s, however, modernization the-
ory was proving incapable of delivering on its promise—something even
Daniel Lerner would admit.28 Societies were indeed changing, but they were
turning out to be “modern” in their own ways and not always in accordance
with the predictions of modernization theory. The realization that Turkey
would not be “a little America” was hard enough; harder still was the real-
ization that the international modern aesthetic that architects were begin-
ning to internalize and localize was rapidly turning into something else, as a

The Americanization of Turkish Architectural Culture 133

 fig. 5.10. Facade detail of
apartment block in Ankara.
Nejat Ersin, 1956–60. Photograph
courtesy of Ali Cengizkan.

fig. 5.11. Example of the “modern vernacular.”

result of social, political, and economic (i.e., extra-architectural) reasons char-

acteristic of peripheral modernities. The modern slab-block apartment, a sym-
bol of modern comfort and the “good life” when accompanied by good design
and landscaping, such as the consideration of appropriate angles of sun and
ventilation, was breeding a faceless and congested urbanscape under the pres-
sure of the speculative apartment boom. The Hilton’s celebrated façade grid
was being endlessly repeated in an anonymous “modern vernacular” of lesser
examples constructed with inferior technical and financial means (fig. 5.11).
Meanwhile, the DP’s massive demolitions and attempts at urban renewal in
Istanbul were already running into di‹culties of financing and a lack of coor-
dination, and the damage they wrought upon Istanbul’s historical urban char-
acter was drawing an increasingly harsh and more vocal criticism. Above all,
the new squatter belts around the major cities were growing at a rate beyond

134 Sibel Bozdovan

fig. 5.12. Istanbul Hyatt Regency Hotel.

all earlier estimates. The country was not able to attract as much foreign invest-
ment as expected; corruption and mismanagement of funds were rampant;
and, most ominously, the populist policies of the DP regime and the relax-
ation of the militantly secular foundations of the republic were drawing
increasing opposition from the military establishment.
The end of both the DP regime and the faith in international-style mod-
ernism came very abruptly, on May 27, 1960, when tanks rolled and the army
took control of Turkey, in what would be the first of a series of military coups.
This was the first sign that Turkey’s transition to “democracy” was going be
interrupted and di‹cult, just as its overall modernization project and the
architectural modernism of the 1950s would be. Having risen to grace along
with the DP regime, the “international style” now fell from grace with the
collapse of that regime, giving way to a new experimentalism—with organic
architecture, regionalism, new brutalism, and the other revisionist trends of
the 1960s. The loss of faith in modernization theory prepared the ground for
discourses of identity and cultural diªerence to reemerge with a vengeance,
which reached its peak in the 1980s. Thereafter, as the role of the nation-state
as the primary agent of modernization diminished, and as the transnational
forces of globalization began to dramatically transform Turkish culture and

The Americanization of Turkish Architectural Culture 135

society, along with its urban landscape, many architects began turning to his-
torical and vernacular precedents in an iconographic search for identity.
One of the greatest ironies of the history of modern architecture is that
“international-style modernism” has flourished during periods of strong iden-
tification with the nation-state, while the re-emergence of the discourse of iden-
tity and diªerence has coincided with the more recent era of transnational
globalization. I want to conclude with a contemporary image that illustrates
these shifts which took place after the 1980s. In figure 5.12, one can see the
old Istanbul Hilton in the background, and in the foreground the more recent
Hyatt Regency Hotel. In a compelling example of what Stuart Hall calls “the
global production of localities,”29 the Hyatt displays many stylistic references
to the traditional “Turkish house.” But it has utilized this well-established
nationalist iconography to symbolize the slick luxury of a five-star hotel, part
of an international chain, and has thus inverted its meaning. I will leave it
to the reader to decide which of the two hotels in the photograph is more
“international.”

notes

1. See Reîat Kasaba, “Populism and Democracy in Turkey, 1946–1961,” in Rules

and Rights in the Middle East, ed. Ellis Goldberg, Reîat Kasaba, and Joel Migdal
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993), 43–68.
2. For example, the prominent author Peyami Safa in his editorials in the 1950s
looked at America as a model of a religious society “where you cannot find one
neighborhood without a church”—a critical reference to the absence of mosque
construction in Turkey in the early republican period. Safa’s essays are collected
in a volume entitled Din, irtica, inkilap (Religion, reaction, revolution) (Istanbul,
1971).
3. Fredric Jameson, “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue,” in The
Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 1998), 54– 77.
4. Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society (New York: Free Press of
Glencoe, 1964), 412.
5. For a critique of Americanization and the DP years from within and from
the left, see N. Berkes, Turk dusununde bati sorunu (Ankara: Bilgi Yayınları, 1975),
146–61; and N. Berkes, Turkiye’de cagdaslasma (Ankara: Bilgi Yayınları, 1975).
6. This is in stark contrast with the predicament of Turkey’s bid for EU mem-
bership today. As a “club” defined in terms of shared cultural and political val-

136 Sibel Bozdovan

ues, rather than as a strategic military alliance like NATO, the EU is hesitant, at
best, if not outright reluctant, to consider Turkey as part of the “Western club.”
7. Annabel Jane Wharton, Building the Cold War (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2001), 22.
8. Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Réjean Legault, eds. Anxious Modernisms
(Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000).
In her paper, “Americanization and Anxiety: Istanbul Hilton Hotel by SOM and
Eldem,” presented at the 2001 ACSA International Conference in Istanbul, Esra
Akcan also discusses the ambiguities of the design of the Istanbul Hilton Hotel
in terms of this “anxiety” about standardization, homogenization, and the dis-
appearance of cultural diªerence.
9. E.g., Istanbul’s population changed from 75.3 percent Muslim and 26 per-
cent non-Muslim in 1935, to 90 percent Muslim and only 10 percent non-Muslim
in 1960. Most of the non-Muslims left after the imposition of a heavy “wealth
tax” exclusively on minorities in the 1940s.
10. See Z. Sayar’s editorial in Arkitekt, no. 9–12 (1954), on the occasion of the
establishment, with 720 members, of the Turkish Chamber of Architects.
11. See Sibel Bozdovan, S. Ozkan, and E. Yenal, Sedad Hakki Eldem: Architect
in Turkey (London: Butterworth, 1990).
12. See, e.g., U. Tanyeli, “1950lerden bu Yana Mimari Paradigmalarin Degisimi
ve Reel Mimarlik,” in 75 yilda deviîen kent ve mimarlik, ed. Y. Sey (Istanbul, 1998),
241.
13. This fact is noted by Enis Kortan in his semi-autobiographical account of
1950s architecture in Turkey, 1950’ler kuîavı mimarlik antolojisi (Istanbul: Yem Yayin-
lari, 1997).
14. See U. Tanyeli, “Haluk Baysal, Melih Birsel,” Arredemento Mimarlik (April
1998): 72– 79.
15. Kortan, 1950’ler kuîavı mimarlik antolojisi, 29.
16. Perkins even prepared the first proposal for the campus plan of METU in
Ankara in 1959. This project was not implemented, and the campus was eventu-
ally built in the 1960s according to the design of the Turkish architects Alt]g and
Behruz Çinici; see Arif T. Payaslıovlu’s Barakadan kampusa, 1954–1964 (Ankara:
METU Publications, 1996), which is a history of METU’s establishment.
17. For a detailed account of the urban interventions of the DP regime, see
Ipek Akpinar, “The Rebuilding of Istanbul after the Plan of Henri Prost, 1937–
1960,” Ph.D. diss., Barttlet School, London, 2003.
18. See, e.g., “Bir Amerikan mutfaginin tertibati” (The organization of an
American kitchen), in Arkitekt, no. 7–10 (1950): 158–61, 166.
19. On this topic, I would like to acknowledge Ela Kacel of Cornell Univer-

The Americanization of Turkish Architectural Culture 137

sity, whose doctoral research on “Intellectualism and Consumerism: Ideologies,
Practices, and Criticisms of Postwar Modernism in Turkey and the United
States” is ongoing.
20. Charles Abrams, Men’s Struggle for Shelter in an Urbanizing World (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1964).
21. See Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM), “Town Planning and Hous-
ing in Turkey,” report prepared for the Turkish Ministry of Public Works, Decem-
ber 1951.
22. Y. Sey, “Cumhuriyet döneminde konut,” in 75 yilda deviîen kent ve mimar-
lik, ed. Y. Sey (Istanbul, 1998), 285.
23. Ela Kacel, “Rethinking Ordinary Architecture in Postwar Turkey,” paper
presented to the Docomomo Conference, New York, September 2004.
24. I have borrowed the phrase “surfacing of modernism” from the special
issue of Perspecta (no. 32 [2001]), edited by Ann Marie Brennan, Nahum Goode-
now, and Brendan D. Moran and entitled “Resurfacing Modernism.” I use the
term in the same double-sense, as both a preoccupation with façade and to denote
the “emergence” of modernism on the cultural agenda.
25. Ali Cengizkan, Modernin saati (Ankara, 2002), 219–27. The Frederick
Gilberd article was published in Arkitekt, nos. 1–4 (1953): 53–61.
26. Sedad Hakki Eldem, “50 yillik cumhuriyet mimarligi,” Akademi, no. 8 ( July
1974): 11.
27. See, e.g., D. C. Tipps, “Modernization Theory and the Comparative Study
of Societies: A Critical Perspective,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 15
(1973): 199–226.
28. Daniel Lerner, “Turkey: From the Past,” in The Turkish Administrator: A
Cultural Survey, ed. Jerry R. Hopper and Richard I. Levin (Ankara: Public Admin-
istration Division, US AID, 1968).
29. See Stuart Hall, “The Local and the Global,” in Culture, Globalization, and
the World-System, ed. Anthony D. King (Binghamton: Dept. of Art and Art His-
tory, State University of New York at Binghamton, 1991).

138 Sibel Bozdovan

6 Temporal States of Architecture
Mass Immigration and Provisional Housing in Israel

roy kozlovsky

T his essay examines the provisional architecture of the ma’abaras

(transit towns) that were built to temporarily house immigrants
who came to Israel during the period of “mass immigration”
(1948–51), and were to be dismantled without a trace once the Israeli gov-
ernment settled these immigrants in permanent housing. O‹cial Israeli his-
toriography depicts the creation of the ma’abaras as an improvised response
to the problems caused by mass immigration. This study problematizes that
account, and with it the understanding of temporary architecture. It recov-
ers the history of the ma’abara so as to delineate an inherent contradiction
of Zionism as first and foremost a modernist project that attempted to cre-
ate a nation-state by radically altering the course of history, while presum-
ing that this could be done rationally and peacefully, according to a plan.
This tension informs the construction of the ma’abaras as negative tempo-
ral and spatial voids into which the eªects of accelerated historical trans-
formation were to be channeled and contained without compromising
Zionism’s utopian self-image. But along with its material aspects, the
ma’abara was also a social unit in which the political agency of its inhabi-
tants and their status as autonomous citizens were temporarily suspended.
My contention is that these two characteristics of the ma’abara—as an instru-
ment of planning and as a mode of governance—are inseparable because
the Zionist nation-building project, from its inception, necessitated the
momentary disempowerment of its subjects.

139
absorbing mass immigration
Historically, the ma’abara was devised in response to the crisis of mass immi-
gration that followed the establishment of Israel in 1948. In just three years,
Israel’s Jewish population had doubled, from 650,000 to 1.2 million (see fig.
6.1). Initially, the government assembled the immigrants into “immigration
camps,” where they were documented, medically examined, and then billeted
to available housing, which included resettlement in evacuated Palestinian
towns and villages. However, in less than a year, all housing options were
exhausted, the camps ceased to function as relay centers, and the ever-increas-
ing number of stranded immigrants remained for indefinite periods in the
camps’ tents and barracks, dependent on soup kitchens for daily subsistence.
This failure to provide newcomers with the elementary necessities of shel-
ter, food, employment, education, and health services soon threatened the
very legitimacy of the new government. With disillusioned camp inhabitants
storming the Knesset on several occasions, the minister of agriculture and
development Pinhas Lavon warned that “one day a hundred thousand such
people, cooped up in the camps without any other outlet could get together
and rise up against us, and cause an explosion that would blow away both
the government and the Knesset.”1
Levi Eshkol, who was in charge of the Jewish Agency’s Settlement Depart-
ment, confronted Prime Minister David Ben Gurion with similar alarm: “In
the past three months death stared us in the face. . . . How could we bring
Jews and settle them in tents? . . . If only we could repress our inclinations
and decide to conduct the immigration according to some plan . . . satisfy-
ing both the needs of the immigrants and the needs of the state.”2
The mass immigration to Israel has been seen as a spontaneous and mes-
sianic event, one that reflected the collective aspirations of Jews of the Dias-
pora to return to their ancestral homeland. But Eshkol’s plea demonstrates
that mass immigration was in fact the outcome of an explicit and contested
policy promoted by Ben Gurion. Two strategic imperatives were behind the
promotion of an unrestricted inflow of people, despite the risks and hardships
this policy entailed. First, the government was concerned that Eastern Euro-
pean and Arab states would halt the outflow of their Jewish subjects to Israel.
Restricting immigration while it was still free (albeit expensive—the Czecho-
slovakian government extorted a fee for each emigration certificate) would have
left some Jewish communities behind, and, in the case of Arab countries, vul-
nerable to acts of retribution. Second, rapid immigration was strategically used

140 Roy Kozlovsky

fig. 6.1. “Jewish immigration by country of birth,” 1948, 1949, and 1950.
From Statistical Abstract of Israel, no. 2 ( Jerusalem: Central Bureau of
Statistics, 1950/1951).
by the state to take possession of territories that, prior to the War of Indepen-
dence (1947–49), were populated by Palestinians. As Ben Gurion stated, “We
have conquered territories, but without settlements they have no decisive
value. . . . Settlement—that is the real conquest! The future of the state depends
on immigration.”3
The result of this counter flow of two populations—Jews flowing in to
the new state of Israel, and Palestinians being driven out to neighboring Arab
states—was the simultaneous emergence of two complementary, but ideo-
logically opposed, landscapes of roughly the same size: the Palestinian
refugee camp and the Israeli ma’abara.4 Both were designed to prevent their
inhabitants from settling permanently, but they had completely diªerent pur-
poses. In this essay, however, I will analyze only the case of the Israeli
ma’abaras and the politics of impermanency that applied to them.
The concept of the ma’abara was an invention of Levi Eshkol, as a way to
replace the “immigrant camp” system. It was a way to maintain the pace of
immigration while containing its explosive political impact. Between 1950 and
1951, 129 ma’abaras were built, housing one out of every three Israelis. While
the emergence of the ma’abara appears to have been chaotic and impro-
visatory, the communities themselves had an orderly, rational appearance.
This can be seen in an aerial photograph, captioned “A neighborhood unit
in the town of Yokneam, being constructed by the immigrants living in pro-
visional shacks along the road” (see fig. 6.2), which was used in o‹cial rep-
resentations of the ma’abara. The photo provides the starting point for my
critique of the concept of the ma’abara.
In the photo, the ma’abara of Yokneam can be seen in the valley below,
and on the hilltop above is the New Town of Upper-Yokneam. The photo-
graph implies an easy transition from the temporary to the permanent. The
prospective settlers of Upper-Yokneam would be housed for the duration of
construction in the temporary settlement below, which in turn would be
dismantled once its inhabitants had moved up the hill. This rationale pro-
vided a justification for the ma’abara as a self-destructing, disposable archi-
tecture: the eventual displacement and uprooting it projects is represented
as progress, as a necessary stage in the ascension uphill toward the ideal,
modern design of the permanent settlement. However, the orderly situation
projected by this image was in no way typical. More often than not, the
ma’abara would be erected without the assuring proximity of the perma-
nent settlement, and the e‹cient transition between the transitory and the
permanent only rarely materialized, causing widespread conflict on the
ground. This suppressed reality will be recovered by examining the design

142 Roy Kozlovsky

fig. 6.2. “A neighborhood unit in the town of Yokneam, being constructed by the immi-
grants living in provisional shacks along the road.”

and organization of the ma’abara along its three distinct scales—the prefab-
ricated shelter unit, the individual settlement, and the nationwide distribu-
tion of ma’abaras.

the prefabricated hut

The Yokneam ma’abara was composed of hundreds of single-family tin huts.
Other ma’abara dwelling units might consist of wooden shacks, aluminum
cabins, canvas huts (a wood structure with canvas walls), or tents (see fig. 6.3).
These motley structures were imported from Canada, the United States, Fin-
land, Sweden, and even Japan. Because shelter suppliers were paid in foreign
currency, these temporary structures were as expensive as permanent
dwellings built with local materials and labor. Levi Eshkol’s report to the gov-
ernment in October 1951 illuminates why such an economically wasteful pol-
icy was nevertheless pursued:

Temporal States of Architecture 143

fig. 6.3. Prefabricated huts being assembled at the Ra’anana Absorption Center for New
Immigrants, March 15, 1949. Photograph by Eldan David.

In order to build 20,000 dwellings this season, we need time, money and
materials, so nobody will live in tents. . . . 3,000 huts are nearly completed
and in one or two weeks will be populated. An additional 6,000 huts and
canvas-huts will be ready by next month, and we have to prepare the foun-
dations and floors before they arrive at the port.5

The deployment of prefabricated technologies at such scale and speed was

the result of a political dilemma: the government could either adjust the
pace of immigration to the capacity of the building industry to construct
permanent homes, or it could accelerate immigration beyond that ability
and bridge the gap with the rapid deployment of temporary structures.
Given these choices, the state employed the prefabricated shelter kit as a
way to bypass the temporal limitations imposed by conventional construc-
tion methods.

the provisional settlement unit

Viewed from the air, there are striking a‹nities between the provisional and
the permanent settlements at Yokneam. Both are composed of one or two
types of repeatable structures, diªerentiated only by their layout pattern. The

144 Roy Kozlovsky

permanent town is comprised of thinly spaced apartment blocks arranged
as an ideal community following the neighborhood unit model,6 whereas the
ma’abara is composed of single-family huts densely placed in the grid layout
of a military camp. These diªerences in density and geometry were the result
of the contrasting concepts of temporality and economy that governed the
planning of the two settlements. The plan of the transitory settlement was
partly determined by economic e‹ciency: since water pipes were in short
supply at the time, the placement of the units was determined by the most
e‹cient layout for a water-supply system (see fig. 6.4). The excessive density
of the settlement was also the result of an intentional strategy that sought
to reinforce the transitory status of the ma’abara by suppressing the possibil-
ity that the inhabitants might settle there, transforming what was intended
to be a transitional living arrangement into something more permanent. This
strategy becomes apparent when one compares the arrangement of hous-
ing in the ma’abara with the unrealized plan for emergency housing that was
developed by Louis Kahn in 1949.
Kahn had been commissioned by the Jewish Agency, the quasi-governmen-
tal organization responsible for immigrant resettlement, to develop plans both
for the immediate production of 40,000 housing units and for the mechaniza-
tion of the Israeli housing industry. He devised an inexpensive method for
mass-producing semi-permanent concrete homes. Each prefabricated unit
would be placed on an individual lot with enough room for its subsequent
enlargement, which allowed the ma’abara to gradually develop into a perma-
nent community (see fig. 6.5). This plan was never realized, perhaps because
it was conceived only to attract American investors, yet its significance lies
in the fact that it provided an alternative settlement model to the ma’abara.
In contrast to Kahn’s plan, the huts in the typical ma’abara were densely spaced,
with little open space between them, precisely in order to prevent the inhab-
itants from expanding them into permanent homes. The design of the
ma’abara was cunning in its resistance to any deviation from its temporary
status, a strategy whose purpose can be appreciated by studying the nation-
wide distribution of the ma’abaras.

the nationwide system of ma’abaras

Roughly half of the 129 ma’abaras that were built in Israel were sited in the
center of the country, adjacent to already established towns and cities, where
their residents could benefit from existing services and employment oppor-
tunities. The other half were scattered across the landscape according to a

Temporal States of Architecture 145

fig. 6.4. Typical plan of a ma’abara, with water-system layout.

national plan. Yokneam, for example, was located in an undeveloped region,

but its location in an isolated area was of strategic importance: it was built
along a critical road that connected the center of the country with its north-
ern provinces. Thus, the system of transit camps, devised to absorb the
demographic shock of mass immigration until permanent settlements
could be prepared, was at the same time instrumental for determining the
future layout of the country according to a preconceived plan. This plan

146 Roy Kozlovsky

fig. 6.5. Louis Kahn’s plan for semi-permanent shelter, 1948–49. Reproduced with
permission of the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania.
was prepared by the Planning Department under the direct patronage of
the prime minister.
Staªed by architects and regional planners who were committed to the
ethos of modernism, the department was in a unique position to pursue the
radical ideals of modern planning: it had at its disposal a vast reserve of nation-
alized land, large numbers of immigrants to settle, and the crucial backing of
the political establishment. The planners sought to avoid “any repetition
of the mistakes made in vaster and richer countries.”7 They were especially
obsessed with creating an ideal distribution of population between city and
country, a statistical abstraction of some theoretical significance during the
interwar period, yet one that was considered a critical issue in the Israeli con-
text. The planners alarmed the public to the fact that in 1948 Israel’s ratio of
urban to rural population was the highest in the world, with 82 percent of
the Jewish population living in the country’s three major cities, and 43 percent
living in Tel Aviv alone. The planners considered this ratio undesirable for
a variety of theoretical and pragmatic reasons. Militarily, the concentration
of population in urban areas was considered dangerous, given the technolo-
gies of modern warfare8; politically, the Jewish population was concentrated
along the Israeli coastal strip, leaving the hinterland empty of Jewish settle-
ment; economically, it was believed that many small cities were more e‹cient
and more stable than a handful of large cities 9; in terms of health policy, pre-
war planning theory maintained that infant mortality and the spread of tuber-
culosis and other health problems were caused by overcrowding and the lack
of open space. There was yet another motive for the policy of decentraliza-
tion: according to the o‹cial development plan of 1951, Israel’s polarized pat-
tern of urbanization “resembled that of colonial territories.” The plan sought
to replicate the historical pattern found in “small Central and West European
countries which are economically, physically and sociologically similar to
Israel.”10 The aim of the planners was to create, ex nihilo, a settlement pat-
tern that would appear to have been shaped by centuries of evolution, in order
to naturalize the artificiality of the Zionist nation-state.
The planning authorities feared that, left to themselves, immigrants would
settle near existing cities and centers of employment, exacerbating the prob-
lem of urban density (see fig. 6.6). By forcing immigrants to settle in a more
dispersed pattern, the planners could achieve what they regarded to be an
ideal balance between town and country, while at the same time ensuring
the colonization of the empty regions of the nation, including those areas
that had previously been inhabited by the Palestinians. The main instrument
of this resettlement policy was to be the New Town program—the establish-

148 Roy Kozlovsky

 fig. 6.6. Poster promoting population dispersal, 1951 ( left), and actual
geographical location of ma’abaras, June 1952 (right).

ment of twenty-eight cities modeled on the British New Town.11 In this

scheme, the ma’abaras, by suspending people in space and time until they could
be permanently settled, would function as human reservoirs for populating
the New Towns. When the ma’abaras were “ liquidated” and their inhabitants
resettled in the New Towns, those who refused to relocate according to plan
were forced to remain in the ma’abaras well into the 1960s, even as immigrants
who arrived after 1953 were immediately given permanent housing. The rudi-
mentary conditions of the temporary settlements were used as leverage
against the very people who inhabited them, forcing them to comply with
the role assigned to them in the overall national plan.12
The rationale for maintaining residents in temporary housing was diªer-
ent in the case of the more favorably located ma’abaras. Housing Ministry
administrators worried that these residents might end up owning land with
potential real estate value:

Temporal States of Architecture 149

 The ma’abaras at the center of the country occupy expensive land adjacent
to main transportation routes, and the rapid development of their surround-
ings has informed the inhabitants of the possibility, which is not unfounded,
of gaining possession of the land as a consequence of their long settlement
on it. . . . Until now we have seen the erroneous location of specific
ma’abaras on expensive sites as wasteful. This waste can develop, in specific
lots, into wholesale theft of property.13

The insistence on the temporary status of the ma’abara was one way to resolve
the contradiction between two forms of ownership: legal deed and posses-
sion through use. Denied the right of possession, its inhabitants could be dis-
placed to other locations according to the national policy of population
distribution, and the vacated land could be put to a more rational use. Yet
the dismantled ma’abaras, once they became available for redevelopment, were
often distributed to housing societies and construction companies a‹liated
with Israel’s political parties. One of these societies that received favorable
treatment was Shikun Ovdim (Workers’ Housing), an organ of the Histadrut
labor union led by Ben Gurion’s Labour Party. What actually informed the
politics of ma’abara clearance, then, was the self-interested notion that acci-
dental gain by individuals was considered “theft,” whereas political gain was
seen as corresponding with the common good.

populating the image

The aerial image of Yokneam suggests that the transition from the tempo-
rary ma’abara to the permanent New Town was e‹cient and frictionless. The
aerial point of view and the symmetrical, abstract composition of the image
give no sense of a human presence, only feeble traces of which are discern-
able. The photo’s ideological function is to suppress the point of view of the
ma’abara’s inhabitants and their everyday living conditions. At ground level,
the ma’abara provided only a rudimentary existence (see fig. 6.7). Large fam-
ilies had to fit into the standard living space of 160 square feet, and were oªered
deficient educational and health services. Due to these conditions, child mor-
tality rates in the ma’abaras were so high that in the early 1950s, they contrib-
uted to the doubling of the national child mortality rate. As these temporary
conditions were prolonged by the state’s failure to liquidate the ma’abaras,
Israel’s established society became anxious that the ma’abaras would breed
social degeneracy and political radicalism. Several investigative committees
were commissioned to examine the living conditions in the ma’abaras.

150 Roy Kozlovsky

fig. 6.7. An immigrant family from Iraq at Yokneam Ma’abara. In the foreground is
Ma’abarah Yokneam, and in background a new housing project for the immigrants living
in the ma’abara. Photograph by Cohen Fritz, dated April 26, 1952.

According to a 1955 report: “In Tel Yeruham there is no phone and the near-
est doctor is 53 kilometers away . . . garbage is collected once every two
weeks . . . in Tira an average of 5.5 people live in one room, in Kurdani 336
people share one shower, in Karkur there is one toilet for 53 people.”14
That such conditions could persist for so many years is indicative of the
imbalance of power that was inscribed into the ma’abaras. Their systemati-
cally disempowered residents were dependent upon and marginalized by the
veteran society and by the institutions under its control, a circumstance that
allowed the state to act contrary to the will or the “self-interest” of the immi-
grants. When some inhabitants of geographically isolated ma’abaras refused
to accept their assigned position in the national dispersal plan and migrated
“independently” to ma’abaras in more prosperous regions, those responsible
for immigration policy recommended radical measures, such as denying work
and food to any settler who relocated without prior authorization.15 Since in
this period essential commodities were distributed by means of a rationing
system and work permits were required in order to be legally employed, it
was still possible to coerce the population into staying in a specific place.
This example demonstrates that in order to function properly, beyond their
physical design, the ma’abaras had to rely on a supplementary system of power.

Temporal States of Architecture 151

It also points to another role of the ma’abaras, articulated in o‹cial state doc-
uments:

The term “ma’abara” has not been clearly defined. The ma’abara diªers
from the immigrant camp in that its inhabitants are self su‹cient, while
those in the camps received bed and board for free. . . . The inhabitants of
the ma’abara live upon wage labor. In other words, “ma’abara” means a fixed
group of settlers residing in temporary dwellings.16

This definition centers on the employment status of the ma’abara’s residents,

since one of the state’s original objectives was to relieve itself of the burden
of feeding and supporting the idle residents of the immigrant camp. The first
ma’abaras were defined as “labor villages,” and their inhabitants were employed
in relief projects such as construction, forestation, and land conservation.
Manual labor was seen as an ideological mechanism for changing the occu-
pational structure of the new Jewish nation, from one of merchants thriving
on the labor of others, to one of a people living oª their own physical labor.
The administrators of the Housing Ministry maintained that, “Construction
acts as a kind of natural vocational school for new immigrants. The major-
ity of new immigrants come from the middle classes and are not accustomed
to physical labor. . . . Under such circumstances the construction industry acts
as an important and desirable transitional stage.”17
The faint foot trails that can be seen in the photograph connecting the
Yokneam ma’abara with the New Town above it were carved into the hillside
by a heterogeneous group of immigrants as they were transformed into a
disciplined labor force. Once construction of the New Town was completed,
other relief projects were organized. Among them, foresting the landscape
became the main employment for those immigrants who had been placed
in the geographically remote ma’abaras at the margins of the national econ-
omy.18 The surplus of labor was channeled into a national program of soil
reconstruction, as one component of “green” Zionism’s project of nature
conservation.19 This progressive policy was linked to another kind of recon-
struction discourse. In his opening address to the second Knesset in 1951, Ben
Gurion identified labor and ecology as pedagogical and symbolic components
of nation building: “We must plant many hundreds of thousands of trees
on . . . a quarter of the area of the state. . . . We are a nation at the beginning
of repairing the corruption of generations, corruption which was done to
the people and corruption which was done to the land.”20

152 Roy Kozlovsky

 The unequal relations of power that were built into the ma’abara made
it possible to objectify their inhabitants as construction material for nation
building. Indeed, the concept of “ labor therapy” was an integral compo-
nent of, not contingent to, to the ma’abara project. As such, it problema-
tizes o‹cial accounts of the ma’abaras as having come into existence as a
response to the challenges posed by mass immigration, since it appears that
there was a preexisting theory of how the ma’abaras should function that
preceded their praxis. The concept of the ma’abara, I would argue, was not
the result of the event of mass immigration, but rather one of the elements
that made that event conceptually possible in the first place, since from its
inception, the Zionist movement had inscribed the concept of the transi-
tory settlement as a necessary component of its modern nation-building
project.

scripting the transitional

A scenario that incorporated temporary architecture, mass immigration, and
the will to design a nation was first scripted by Theodor Herzl (1860–1904)
some fifty years prior to the establishment of the state of Israel. With his 1896
publication of The Jewish State, Herzl transformed Zionism from a messianic
movement based on religious sentiments into a modern, organized move-
ment. Written as a manual for nation building, the book outlined the organi-
zational methods for relocating the Jewish population of Europe to another
(as yet unspecified) continent, as well as the means for establishing a secular
nation-state, for which Herzl also supplied an ideal constitutional and social
framework. The book’s instant success transformed Herzl from a journalist
and failed playwright with little interest in Zionism into the movement’s
leader. By arming the Zionist movement with the instruments of planning
as a method for mastering its future, Herzl also transformed Zionism into
an eªective political movement of international scope. Herzl’s overriding
desire was to appropriate modernity as the new faith of the Jewish people:
“We are a modern people already, wanting to become the most modern
among peoples.”21 This desire manifested itself in an uninhibited belief in
progress and reason as the means for mastering historical change. Contrary
to more evolutionary or organic visions of Zionism, which favored the slow,
gradual acculturation of a Jewish cultural entity in Palestine, Herzl assumed
that a nation could be instantly created, if it were only guided by the right
plan.22 As he stated, “From the start, everything will be determined accord-

Temporal States of Architecture 153

ing to plan . . . we will use all the sociological and technical achievements not
only of the time in which we live, but also of the future times . . . with unprece-
dented chances of success.”23
Herzl and his followers believed they could establish an ideal society, as
they had the advantage of starting from scratch and could avoid both repeat-
ing the mistakes of other nations and the contingencies of unplanned his-
torical change. In his follow-up novel, Old New Land, published in 1902, Herzl
declared that it was possible to “establish our Society without inherited draw-
backs. . . . Nations with unbroken histories have to carry burdens assumed
by their ancestors. Not we.”24 His preference for a creationist, expert-driven
mode of statecraft over an evolutionary process determined Herzl’s con-
cept of planning. He envisioned the colonization of Palestine as a rapid event,
a feat he presented as unproblematic, since unlike the military planners of
the Napoleonic wars, “we had only to settle half a million people by the
autumn.”25 Herzl’s blasé attitude to such a radical undertaking reflects an
uncritical integration of military strategy to civic aªairs. The mobilization
of society along military principles was ingrained in the details of Herzl’s
plan. With his proposal that the new country’s labor force, the first to immi-
grate, should be temporarily housed in prefabricated shelters that could
be purchased wholesale to cut expenses, Herzl anticipated the deployment
of the ma’abaras that would take place nearly fifty years in the future: “I
ordered five hundred barracks from France—a new kind that could be taken
apart like a tent and put together in an hour.”26 Not only did Herzl script
transient architecture as a logistical necessity to the Zionist project, he also
proposed using labor to transform immigrants into citizens. In The Jewish
State, he envisioned that “Jews will enter the new land under the sign of
labor,” and he advocated labor therapy to discipline the masses into mid-
dle-class values: “By their labor [the unskilled] will gain the right to own
their own houses . . . if they give evidence of good behavior for a period of
three years. In this way we will develop a diligent people who can be read-
ily employed. A man with the discipline of three years’ work behind him is
ready for life.”27
The concept of the ma’abara as a spatio-temporal void was inscribed
into Zionism as a necessary, even advantageous, stage for creating a mod-
ern nation-state. It secured the conception of both Palestine and the Jewish
people as empty, abstract entities that could be shaped by disinterested experts
and universal parameters of science and reason, without having to negotiate
existing historical structures or the diversity of interests. Such a conception
allowed the Zionist movement to envision a mode of action that circum-

154 Roy Kozlovsky

vented political process, since it refused to acknowledge conflicting desires
and interests, or to allow their political negotiation through compromise or
struggle.

tests and rehearsals

During the actual colonization of Palestine, Zionist planners submitted the
concept of transitory architecture to a series of small-scale, concrete tests.
An illuminating case is the “tower-and-stockade” settlement, a technique that
was invented during the Arab Rebellion of 1936– 39 for building cooperative
village settlements in hostile territory against the resistance of Palestinian
militias. A settlement was initially comprised of a prefabricated fortified
nucleus that was transported and assembled on site in one day. At a later stage,
the settlement would grow out of its protective cocoon and metamorphose
into its final, utopian form (see fig. 6.8). The success of the experiment vali-
dated the hypothesis that the contingent and violent process of colonization
could be contained in the scaªolding, allowing the finished architectural object
to communicate a purified, ideal image of the Zionist project.
In addition to this local experiment, Herzl’s scenario for the accelerated
movement of people was rehearsed under emergency conditions in 1942, when
Ben Gurion proposed to bring in a million Jewish refugees from Europe in
ten days: the D-day of Zionism. A debate ensued, with critics claiming that
“hundreds of thousands of unemployed masses will explode our country. . . .
We must transfer immigrants in a planned, ordered method, and not in a cat-
astrophic way.”28 To contain the risks of mass immigration, Ben Gurion com-
missioned a group of experts to prepare the “Million Plan,” which included a
complete design for a system of camps to house the influx of refugees until
they could be settled and employed. The plan was elaborated with great detail,
even calculating the caloric value of the meals that were to be prepared in
the camps’ kitchens.29 The existence of the “Million Plan” requires us to reeval-
uate the way in which the story of the ma’abaras has been told, since it now
appears that the concept of the ma’abara was in fact the precondition for, not
the eªect of, mass immigration. Revising the o‹cial history of the ma’abara
by inverting the sequence of cause and eªect points to a fundamental contra-
diction in Zionism’s practice of modern planning. The discipline of planning
was developed to rationalize and coordinate the process of modernization,
rendering it more e‹cient and less disruptive to society. But in the case of
the ma’abaras, planning became an altogether diªerent instrument: it was
used to radicalize and compress history, and to introduce new risks and

Temporal States of Architecture 155

fig. 6.8. Beit Yosef “tower-and-stockade” settlement. Top: The settlement in 1937, after
having been built in a single day. Bottom: The settlement in its final form, 1939. Repro-
duced with permission of the Zionist Central Archive, Jerusalem.
upheavals. It allowed Zionism to calculate the risks of accelerated social and
geographical change, and to promote extreme policies such as doubling
the population in three years and managing hundreds of thousands of
immigrants in military-like conditions, all the while maintaining that such
upheavals could be contained in the transition phase without lasting nega-
tive consequences.

the performance stage

The performance of the immigration script on a mass scale did not replicate
the results of the small-scale rehearsals. While most of the ma’abaras were
dismantled in the mid-1950s when their inhabitants were relocated into per-
manent settlements, the temporary stage produced unforeseen, long-term
distortions in Israel’s social structure. The residents of the ma’abaras received
inferior medical and educational services and suªered from poverty and
endemic unemployment, and the kind of work available to them was mostly
manual labor. As the ma’abaras spatially separated longtime citizens from
immigrants, they retarded the integration of the immigrants into the polit-
ical and economic system. Since the population of the ma’abaras was made
up predominantly of Sephardic Jews—72 percent versus 22 percent of Ashke-
nazi origin—whereas the veteran society was predominantly Ashkenazi, the
ma’abaras initiated a process by which Israel’s Jewish population became
divided along ethnic lines.30 The enduring correspondence between class and
ethnicity in Israeli society, and its origin in the ma’abara, led to the emergence
of a counter-narrative in which the memory of the ma’abara was made into
a signifier of social and political inequality. Contemporary Sephardic iden-
tity is grounded upon the perception of the ma’abaras as representing an act
of violence and humiliation inflicted upon them by the Ashkenazi “establish-
ment.” Shimon Ballas, in his 1964 novel, The Ma’abara, gave voice to the expe-
rience of Iraqi immigrants living in the ma’abaras with the following words:

It appears to me that since the Babylonian exile, never such a horrible holo-
caust has been inflicted upon the Jews of Mesopotamia as the holocaust it
presently suªers. This enlightened and ancient community was crushed
to dust and dispersed upon desolate and foul places called ma’abaras. . . .
Is this not exile?31

The above passage should be read, beyond the narrow discourse of identity
politics, as furthering a more structural critique of Zionism and its un-homely

Temporal States of Architecture 157

conception of space. Ballas claims that the Zionist project reproduced the
very conditions it attempted to negate—dispersion, exile, and disempower-
ment. Yet he also advances the critical possibility of maintaining a diasporic
position from within a nationalistic culture. And as condemning as this pas-
sage is, it represents only one voice out of the multitude of experiences that
are enacted in the novel, in which everyday life in its vitality and impurity is
shown to undermine the o‹cial design of the ma’abara.
Such unforeseen and unintended outcomes of life in the ma’abaras leads
to the conclusion that the concept of the transitory allowed Zionism to main-
tain its utopian vision of territorial and social harmony, while also enabling it
to act and to exercise power, both in relation to the Jewish subjects who would
inhabit those voids, and the Palestinians, whose prior presence and displace-
ment would remain as a void in the nation’s collective memory. And it is pre-
cisely here that the violence of this mechanism brings a local subjectivity into
being. In a dialectical manner, the local is that which resisted its negation and
silencing by a modernist discourse that assigned it a transitory, empty space.

notes

An earlier version of this essay appeared as “Necessity by Design,” in Perspecta

34 (2003): 10–19.
1. Statement made April 22, 1949 (see Tom Segev, 1949: The First Israelis [New
York: Free Press, 1986], 136). The Knesset is the Israeli parliament.
2. Statement made January 2, 1950 (see Segev, 1949, 140). Eshkol replaced Lavon
as minister of agriculture and development in 1951.
3. Ben Gurion to Foreign Ministry staª, April 12, 1949, in Segev, 1949, 97.
4. In the three years after May 1948, 685,000 immigrants entered Israel, while
approximately 700,000 Palestinians became refugees.
5. “The Situation in the Ma’abaras” (in Hebrew), Government Meeting
Memorandum, October 11, 1951, Session 2, Article 11, Israel State Archive.
6. The American sociologist Clarence Perry developed the concept of the neigh-
borhood unit in the 1920s as a strategy for creating self-su‹cient urban commu-
nities by organizing residential development around services catering to the family.
It was popular with postwar English planners, and subsequently with Israeli plan-
ners as well.
7. Aryeh Sharon, Physical Planning in Israel ( Jerusalem: Government Press,
1951); quote is from the English supplement, p. 3. Sharon, a graduate of the
Bauhaus, was the head of the Planning Department.

158 Roy Kozlovsky

 8. Anatole Solow, an expert from MIT, advised the Israeli government in 1949
to implement the American postwar strategy of decentralization as a defense against
a possible future atomic war. In a 1954 speech on settlement policy, Ben Gurion
noted: “We are living in the era of total war. . . . The more settlements are smaller
and better dispersed, the danger diminishes” (David Ben Gurion, On Settlement: Col-
lected Speeches, 1915–1956 [in Hebrew] [Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1986], 116).
9. Israeli planners inferred from the Great Depression that the key to eco-
nomic stability lay in geographical patterns of settlement: “It is of interest that
during the great economic crisis which Germany and America experienced in
the twenties, the large cities and purely agricultural areas were the main victims,
whereas the small and medium towns with their well-balanced economy stood
firm” (Sharon, Physical Planning in Israel, 4).
10. Ibid., 4. Israeli planners found pseudo-scientific justification for their
“organic” dispersal ideology in Walter Christaller’s “central place theory,” which
was based on a mathematical analysis of settlement patterns in South Germany.
11. Eighteen New Towns were established between 1948 and 1951, and ten more
by 1957. In contrast, the British project consisted of “only” eleven New Towns
between 1946 and 1955. Patrick Abercrombie, the author of the Greater London
Plan (1944), which envisioned the relocation of a million Londoners into New
Towns, was commissioned by the Israeli planners to persuade Ben Gurion to pur-
sue this policy. In their meeting, Ben Gurion is reported to have remarked that
“it was easier to do so in Israel, where we had only to direct the immigrants into
the development areas and new towns” (Aryeh Sharon, Kibbutz + Bauhaus [Tel
Aviv: Massada, 1982], 79).
12. Haim Darin-Drabkin, “Economic and Social Aspects of Israeli Housing,”
in Public Housing in Israel: Surveys and Evaluations of Activities in Israel’s First Decade,
1948–1958 (Tel Aviv: Gadish, 1959), 33. As late as 1963, there were still 15,300 people
living in ma’abaras.
13. “Plan to Liquidate Ma’abaras—Permanent Housing for Immigrants” (in
Hebrew), September 17, 1952, document G 5558/19, Israel State Archive.
14. “Committee for the Coordination of Social Services in the Ma’abaras” (in
Hebrew), Ministry of Labor, July 1954, document G 5558/3903, Israel State Archive.
15. Yosef Weitz, the director of the Settlement Department, reported that he
was “partaking in several measures to stop the migration of new settlers from
place to place without our prior authorization. One of the measures recommended
is preventing the relocation of food rationing cards without our approval” (Dvora
Hacohen, The Grain and the Millstone [in Hebrew] [Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1998], 194).
16. “Committee for the Coordination of Social Services in the Ma’abaras”
(in Hebrew), July 1954, document G 5558/3903, Israel State Archive.

Temporal States of Architecture 159

 17. Darin-Drabkin, Public Housing in Israel, 78.
18. The pace of forestation correlates with the construction of the ma’abaras:
in 1949, 2,910 dunams (1,000 square meters) were forested. In 1950, that figure
had risen fourfold, to 12,650 dunams, and in 1951, fourfold again, to 56,400 dunams
(see Shaul E. Cohen, The Politics of Planting [Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1993], 64).
19. Zionist planners were associated with the first wave of modern environ-
mentalism. Several Israeli planners graduated from the Berlin-Charlottenburg tech-
nical school, a prewar center of ecological and regional planning that promoted
the ethics and aesthetics of sustainable development, especially soil and water con-
servation. Regretfully, a critical history of “green” Zionism is yet to be written.
20. Cohen, The Politics of Planting, 61.
21. Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State (Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aharonson, 1997),
195.
22. Such as Ahad Ha’am’s brand of “cultural Zionism,” which proposed to
establish a cultural center in Palestine, rather than a nation-state, or Franz
Oppenheimer’s plan for an incremental settlement process.
23. Herzl, The Jewish State, 194.
24. Theodor Herzl, Old New Land (New York: Herzl Press, 1987), 78.
25. Ibid., 228.
26. Ibid., 205.
27. Herzl, The Jewish State, 156. Herzl was influenced by Edward Bellamy’s
1888 utopian novel, Looking Backward, and especially Bellamy’s idea of the indus-
trial army, in which labor was performed as a contractual duty that gained citi-
zens the right to society’s collective goods. Hence Herzl’s original design for
the Jewish state’s flag, which had seven stars representing the seven-hour work-
day as the foundation of his “third way” approach to resolving the conflict
between capital and labor.
28. See Eliezer Kaplan (the future finance minister) to Ben Gurion, in Dvora
Hacohen, From Fantasy to Reality: Ben Gurion’s Plan for Mass Immigration, 1942–1945
(in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defence Press, 1994), 114.
29. Hacohen, From Fantasy to Reality, 130.
30. Miriam Kachensky, “The Ma’abaras,” in Immigrants and Ma’abaras (in
Hebrew), ed. Mordechai Naor ( Jerusalem: Yad Ben Zvi, 1986), 75. This unequal
ratio was not the result of an intentional discriminatory policy, but rather the
contingent product of the specific timing in which each Jewish Diaspora group
arrived in Israel.
31. Shimon Ballas, The Ma’abara (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1964), 51.

160 Roy Kozlovsky

7 Modernisms in Conflict
Architecture and Cultural Politics in Post-1967 Jerusalem

alona nitzan-shiftan

S hortly after the 1967 War, when Israel occupied East Jerusalem and the
Old City formerly governed by Jordan, the feverish building of the
unilaterally unified city began. Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek, who
wanted a bounded and e‹cient city, fought against the government’s plans to
extend Jerusalem’s boundaries into the occupied territories. Lodged between
national and urban interests, he invited the elite of Western architecture—
Buckminster Fuller, Louis Kahn, Lewis Mumford, and Bruno Zevi, among
seventy other luminaries of the newly established Jerusalem Committee—
to discuss and approve his multidisciplinary master plan. Rather than endors-
ing this modernist blueprint, however, these invited critics attacked the plan
as transgressing Jerusalem’s “natural charm and spiritual beauty.”1 Their crit-
icisms provoked a series of confrontations between architectural, municipal,
and national institutions. The result was a dramatic break with the modernist
landscape that had predominated in pre-1967 Jerusalem (see figs. 7.1 and 7.2).
Having to do with one of the world’s most emotionally charged cities,
this criticism raised a set of poignant questions: How should Jerusalem be
constructed under the new Israeli rule? Should it be a universal spiritual cen-
ter or a metropolitan Israeli capital? And what conception of architectural
modernism might best embody these alternatives? This essay examines these
questions through the prism of post–World War II architectural culture and
its criticism of the seemingly unified modernist movement in architecture.
The latter was codified in seminal texts, exhibitions, and institutions that

161
 fig. 7.1. David Anatol Brutzkos, Upper Lifta, 1960s. Reprinted from Israel Builds
(Israel Ministry of Housing, 1965).

fig. 7.2. Salo Hershman, Gilo, Cluster 11, 1970s. Reprinted from Israel Builds (Israel
Ministry of Housing, 1988), 112.
identified it with the international style, functional planning, and urban
renewal projects. Post-1967 Jerusalem provided an opportunity for postwar
architects to revise and situate the resultant modernisms that were often entan-
gled in modernization projects. Their intervention, via architectural criticism,
in the politics of space in Jerusalem demonstrates how information extrane-
ous to the Zionist ethos and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict nonetheless pro-
foundly aªects their course.
The essay analyzes this intervention by focusing on how the Jerusalem Com-
mittee directly inserted postwar architectural knowledge into the Israeli plan-
ning process. In the committee’s plenary meetings, in 1969, 1973, and 1975, the
debates pertaining to physical planning were particularly heated.2 At the very
first of these meetings there was already a demand for the creation of a sub-
committee for town planning. That subcommittee met only once, in Decem-
ber 1970. During its deliberations, which this essay examines in detail, Jerusalem
became a testing ground where two modernisms competed for supremacy.
The first of these, the modernization of Jerusalem as carried out by Israeli
planners, was predicated on the logic of “progress and development”—
the bedrock of Zionist planning.3 It demanded comfort and e‹ciency for every
Israeli and Palestinian alike, within the bounded city, thus assuming a neutral
definition of “residency” in what was (and remains) a deeply divided city. The
second approach exemplified the post–World War II architectural culture of
the diverse international membership of the Jerusalem Committee,4 and grew
out of a shared criticism of the modern movement in architecture and an anx-
iety toward its cooptation in modernization projects. This latter group’s call
for regional and monumental expression was geared toward the spatial real-
ization of the idea of Jerusalem as a spiritual center. The competition between
these two modernisms, which I call “developmental” modernism and “situ-
ated” modernism, respectively,5 aªected issues concerning democracy, religion,
orientalism, and the ideology of nation-building, all of which related to the
pressing question of whose history, religion, and nationality would be given
form in the built landscape of modern Jerusalem.
Throughout the 1970 debate, the international committee criticized the
Israeli planners in the name of universal values—that is, their objections
reflected the then current discussions among architects regarding the crisis
of the modernist city. Kollek’s guests considered themselves victims of the
urban renewal projects and inner-city highways that had destroyed the tra-
ditional patterns of American cities, and they came to Jerusalem to protect
that historic city from a similar destiny.6 It was the apparent rigor and neu-
trality of these professionals as they debated the role of architecture in mod-

Modernisms in Conflict 163

ernization projects that enabled the committee to have such a far-reaching
impact on the politics of space in Jerusalem. But the operation of the com-
mittee, with an overwhelmingly American presence and with no Muslim
members, demonstrated the degree to which the debate had already been
politicized. Both the Israelis and the international critics, mostly Jews and
Christians, focused their discussions on Jerusalem as the hub of the three
monotheistic faiths, whereas Muslims saw the city as a battleground between
two competing nations. Since they could not join this advisory body without
legitimizing Israeli rule over Jerusalem, Muslims of all nationalities declined
to participate. Instead, they were represented by “experts”— orientalist prox-
ies chosen by Kollek—and, as a result, Islamic claims for Jerusalem were con-
fined to religious issues. The intervention of the international committee thus
demonstrates the cultural politics of global practice in a local site—a site of
contention between Muslims and Jews, Palestinians and Israelis, over the pos-
session of territory and history.

two modernisms clash

The 1970 meeting presented a rather unusual occasion. Mayor Kollek, acutely
aware of the international attention that was focused on Jerusalem after 1967,
invited about thirty renowned architects and town planners from nine coun-
tries to participate in the Subcommittee for Town Planning. He urged the
five major Israeli planning agencies to voluntarily submit their coordinated
1968 Jerusalem Masterplan and its complements for the subcommittee’s
scrutiny.7 The reviewers included such luminaries as Louis Kahn, Lewis Mum-
ford, Bruno Zevi, Buckminster Fuller, Christopher Alexander, Philip John-
son, Nikolaus Pevsner, Moshe Safide, Lawrence Halprin, and Isamu Noguchi,
to mention a few.
These esteemed representatives of postwar architectural culture volun-
tarily arrived in Jerusalem on December 19, 1970, to participate in the three-
day meeting of the subcommittee. The invitees had received comprehensive
reports about the Israeli planning documents prior to their arrival. In Jeru-
salem, they attended an intense program of lectures and site visits before they
began their formal deliberations, with forty Israeli architects, planners, and
government o‹cials in attendance. These formal discussions were organized
around thematic sessions and were open to the press, but closed to the public.
The public was invited to listen to the committee’s concluding remarks, how-
ever, an event which many young Israeli architects remember as being pro-
fessionally formative.

164 Alona Nitzan-Shiftan

 Earlier that year, in August 1970, public debate on the 1968 plan had already
begun. The original plan called for a clearly bounded city, but the Israeli gov-
ernment had violated this urban dictate by confiscating more than 4,000 acres
of East Jerusalem land, in order to build residential neighborhoods that would
territorially fix Israeli rule over the recently occupied territory (see fig. 7.3).
This act provoked a local and international uproar. Kollek sided with those
critics who argued that the politicians had abused the professional integrity
of the master plan in the name of settlements and had compromised aes-
thetics in favor of occupation. Given this overheated atmosphere, reported
by the news media worldwide, expectations for the December 1970 meeting
of the Jerusalem Committee architects ran high. The planners expected to
receive the professionals’ support, but instead they were surprised by the com-
mittee’s criticism. Municipal architect Arthur Kutcher later reported:

At a hastily called special session, closed to the public, the members of the
Committee expressed their feelings about the plans to the Israeli authori-
ties. Most of them were enraged by what they had seen. Some of them
wept, others were nearly hysterical, and at least one was taken ill. The
o‹cials, who had expected the usual pat on the back given by such con-
vocations of visiting firemen, were completely amazed. It had apparently
never occurred to them that anyone would take a town plan so to heart.8

The unequivocal rejection of the plan devastated and confused the Israeli
planners. “The foreign critics,” wrote the Jerusalem Post, “were not wielding
a scalpel on the Masterplan, but a guillotine.”9 Surprisingly, the committee’s
criticism addressed neither the internationally contested designation of Jeru-
salem as a unified Israeli capital, nor the public’s frustration with the urban
implications of the confiscation of land in East Jerusalem. Their critique, by
focusing on the malaise of modernist urbanism, made the plan into a refer-
endum against the imposition of the Zionist modernist blueprint on the city
of Jerusalem.

the jerusalem committee

From the outset, the creation of the Jerusalem Committee with an inter-
national membership had been a political act. It was done on the initiative of
Mayor Kollek, who had limited power in the arena of state politics. Kollek was
a sharp politician and a masterful administrator. In 1969, in an eªort to tran-
scend the limitations of his own power, he invited the seventy luminaries of

Modernisms in Conflict 165

 fig. 7.3. Map of Greater Jerusalem
after August 1970 confiscation.
From Time, March 1, 1971.

the Jerusalem Committee to come to Jerusalem to oversee the Israelis’ work

there. On that occasion, he assured the committee members that, “The prob-
lem is not ours alone, as residents of the city; it belongs, in a sense, to the
entire world, to all those people who are Jerusalemites in their hearts and
minds.”10 By submitting the Israelization of Jerusalem to international sur-
veillance, Kollek was endeavoring to legitimate his own mandate to govern
Jerusalem, not just in an o‹cial, political sense, but according to moral and
aesthetic precepts as well. Kollek reported with some satisfaction that only

166 Alona Nitzan-Shiftan

 fig. 7.4. Teddy Kollek ( former mayor of Jerusalem), Louis Kahn, and R. Buckminster
Fuller in Jerusalem. Photo by Isamu Noguchi, 1969. Courtesy of the Isamu Noguchi
Foundation.

one invitee had refused to join the committee, and that was because of the
occupation of East Jerusalem.11
The beautification of Jerusalem represented the frontier of Kollek’s cul-
tural policy, and the architects became his indispensable agents (see fig. 7.4).
When Buckminster Fuller suggested that Jerusalem should become “de-
sovereignized,” a “world-man-territory” of world citizens, because it “is at
the still center of the revolving forces of history,” Kollek remained aloof,12
since the power of his agenda lay in the strict separation of politics and plan-
ning. “This city has to live regardless of politics,” he insisted. “What we want
are competent opinions on town planning.”13
The committee’s autonomy, international membership, and profession-
alism gave it critical weight—its members had received a mandate to speak
in the name of universal values in the realms of aesthetics and humanism.
They had been given a unique opportunity to reexamine the boundaries of
architecture and its modernist legacy in an area saturated with history and
symbolism—an area that had previously provoked much antagonism among
modernists of the Neue Sachlichkeit persuasion.14 In Jerusalem, as members
of a late modernist club, criticizing themselves, they were free to experiment

Modernisms in Conflict 167

with the architectural trends that had flourished in the previous decade, such
as regionalism, new brutalism, organicism, and the new tendencies toward
preservation, so as to find the professional tools that would be the most ade-
quate for Jerusalem.
As a leading forum for such debates, the periodical Architectural Design con-
sequently observed about the committee: “All too conscious of the politically
explosive background to their deliberations, the Committee had endeavored
to keep to basic planning issues common to all cities and people irrespective
of race or creed.”15 The seeming neutrality of this debate was arguably its
greatest achievement. By advancing cultural rather than territorial politics, it
allowed the imperial underpinnings of the debate about Jerusalem to be hid-
den beneath the discussion and debate about its beautification.

the zionist blueprint: 1968 jerusalem masterplan

The 1968 Jerusalem Masterplan had its roots in a plan originally commissioned
in 1964 by Mayor Kollek’s predecessor, Mordechai Ish Shalom, who estab-
lished an interdisciplinary professional team to coordinate the various agen-
cies involved in planning for the modernization of the city.16 Shalom chose
as his principal planners the brothers Zion and Avia Hashimshoni and Yoseph
Schweid, who were members of the professional and academic establishment
of Zionist modernist planning. Zion Hashimshoni had already had a leading
role in Israel’s first ultramodernist master plan.17 Avia Hashimshoni, the team
leader (and the author of Israel’s first architectural history) was a professor
of architecture at the Technion, where in the mid-1960s he represented the
modernist-functionalist camp in Israel’s sole architectural school.
The 1968 plan inherited from its Zionist predecessors the logic of an ordered
environment, but stressed the benefits of urban forms.18 Its goal was three-
fold: to create the blueprint for a national, civic-municipal, and universal town-
planning. First, it sought to enhance the civic importance of the presumed
national capital; second, it sought the well-being of the city’s inhabitants;
and third, it sought to reinforce the significance of Jerusalem’s religious sites.
These goals were translated into a set of objectives for which the plan provided
detailed physical “solutions.”19 The plan’s numerous diagrams depicted the
desired relationship between the built and natural landscape, by specifying a
plain architecture and by exhibiting a certain distrust of visual expressiveness
(see fig. 7.5). The plan specified a contained city, geared to the everyday needs
of its residents. To achieve this, it called for a modernist infrastructure, exten-
sive road systems, and the convenient distribution of urban and civic activi-

168 Alona Nitzan-Shiftan

fig. 7.5. The City and the Metropolitan Space. Reprinted from 1968 Jerusalem Master-
plan ( Jerusalem: Jerusalem Municipality, 1972), 63.

ties.20 The meticulous research and careful statistical analyses of the planners,
packed into diagrams and colored maps, gave it a scientific aura.

developmental vs. situated modernism

That the master plan had “no vision, spirit, theme or character” was the most
generally held assessment of it by the international committee. “We were
not given a clue to an aspiration,” Louis Kahn protested at the 1970 meeting.
“We were given a problem analysis.”21 The plan’s method of “solving” the
problems of Jerusalem evoked the committee’s worst fears of architecture’s
demise in the face of giving precedence to scientific and administrative oper-
ations. The committee’s discussions were saturated with anxious talk over
the prospect of turning Jerusalem “into a modern, International Style ville
radieuse—skyscrapers, massive housing projects, freeway spaghetti, and all.”22
The journalist Amos Elon suggested that the proposed road system would turn
ancient Jerusalem into a pictorial “gas station sacred to the three religions.”23
The conflict seemed inevitable: the international committee, acting on
behalf of “world cultures,” had taken upon itself the mandate of protecting
the city from the bite of modernization, which threatened Jerusalem, in par-
ticular, because of that city’s political importance.24 Israelis, for their part,
were not thrilled to be expected to live like cultural relics.25 Kollek put it more
bluntly: “You would like to drive up in big cars but you want us in Jerusalem
riding on donkeys. No matter how charming and picturesque that might be,
the rest of the world forges ahead into the 21st century.”26

Modernisms in Conflict 169

 Given these contradictory pressures, how was such a city to develop? The
committee argued that, since it was impossible to deny the weight of the aes-
thetic and spiritual qualities of Jerusalem, the blueprint for its growth had to
be sought within the discipline of architecture. The architectural critic Wolf
von Eckardt stressed that Jerusalem required unique skills for translating
“poetic-subjective experiences such as sacredness, charm and mystery into
architectural design terminology of stone, concrete and asphalt.”27 Christo-
pher Alexander insisted that the “answer to how one makes this a religious
city should be present in the morphology of the existing plan.”28 And Louis
Kahn concluded: “Jerusalem deserved the aura of the unmeasureable.”29
Each of their comments echoed the debates over the tenets of post–World
War II modernism. Modernism had started as an avant-garde movement with
social underpinnings for rational planning, technological innovation, and bare
aesthetics. Its stress on functionalism, mass production, and proper infra-
structure, as well as its famous call for separating the city into secluded zones
of work, habitation, recreation, and transportation, was intended to redeem
the nineteenth-century industrial city from its severe urban predicament.
During the interwar period, the abstract and internationalist discourse of
modernists came under attack from many nationalist regimes.30 After World
War II, however, the already established Modern movement gained enor-
mous power, which led not only to the architectural reconstruction of a dev-
astated Europe, but to complementary modernization projects in many
postcolonial nation-states, all of which furthered modernism’s universaliz-
ing mission.
The 1968 plan exemplified a universal developmental logic that had already
come under attack by a younger generation of architects during the 1950s
and 1960s. Aldo van Eyck, for example, a prominent Dutch architect and mem-
ber of Team X, complained that orthodox modernists had created “just mile
upon mile of organized nowhere, and nobody feeling he is somebody living
somewhere.”31 Van Eyck’s generation lamented the loss of such notions as
hierarchy, community, identity, and place in the well-administrated, yet thor-
oughly alienating modernist urban environments. They asked how one might
forge an identity between people and place through architectural means.
They questioned why modern architecture had failed to perform this task of
representing and identifying people with their physical environments, a task
that fell within architecture’s traditional province.
Post–World War II architects contended that in the race to improve the
human condition, modern architecture had forgotten the man within—his
(and it was always “his”) sense of place and heritage. In order to redeem an

170 Alona Nitzan-Shiftan

impoverished and ugly modernist urbanness, and in an eªort to restore the
discipline’s autonomous values, they looked back to an architecture before
modernism. They were responsible for gradually lifting the modernist ban
on revisiting past traditions, and they started looking at history, the vernac-
ular, and nature to find authoritative architectural guidelines for situating mod-
ernism between people and their places.32
Modernist architecture, having disparaged the traditional tools of the trade,
could now finally enjoy, as Denys Lasdun put it, a “physical awakening.” Louis
Kahn led the return to “architecture as it has always been” by eclipsing for-
mal precedents in favor of timeless architectural principles: “our relations to
earth, sky, fire and water; the myriad ways of defining space and controlling
light, of relating materials and structure to all these elements, of establish-
ing systems of order (including disorder).”33 Architects now sought similarly
timeless rules from within vernacular traditions, rules that were dictated pri-
marily by instincts regarding habitation, rather than by rational planning.34
Christopher Alexander suggested, for example, that instead of creating
rational, artificial cities, architecture should emulate the stratification and
inconsistently built patterns of older cities.35
This vibrant new architectural climate made the prospect of advising on
the building of Jerusalem particularly attractive, and it brought architects
to the city on a voluntary basis. In all probability, however, the only thing that
this diverse body of critics fully shared was a common enemy: institutional
modernist urban planning as it was represented in urban renewal schemes
that could be found worldwide. The committee’s architects found the enemy
in the 1968 Jerusalem Masterplan and passionately criticized its ideology and
methodology. But because their debate was itself ideological, with respect
to Jerusalem, the encounter between the two modernisms had a great impact
on issues pertaining to democratic practices, religion, and orientalist imagery,
and finally, on the relationship between nation and state in a situation in which
only one of the competing nations enjoyed complete sovereignty.

one center vs. two cores

The 1968 plan advocated an inner city that would be nestled within a larger
bounded city. The inner loop would encircle two clearly distinguished centers—
one religious, the other civic—that would be paired rather than fused. The
former would contain historical and religious sites, and would be centered
on the newly seized Old City; the latter would be comprised of state insti-
tutions and would be located within the government precinct of West Jeru-

Modernisms in Conflict 171

 fig. 7.6. 1968 Jerusalem Masterplan schema for the city structure.
Reprinted from 1968 Jerusalem Masterplan ( Jerusalem: Jerusalem
Municipality, 1972), 62.

salem (see fig. 7.6). According to this plan, these clearly bounded cores were
to be symbolically and aesthetically self-contained.
The international committee objected to the symbolic bifurcation of the
city. A modernist capital could exist anywhere, the visiting architects thought,
but for Bruno Zevi, for example, Jerusalem was more than just the people
who lived there. According to his colleagues in the committee, a spiritual cen-
ter of such magnitude and beauty had to emanate from the core of the Old
City outward in order to achieve a unified image of civil and spiritual coher-
ence. In so arguing, they ignored the political di‹culties of such a proposi-
tion. Under this view, religious sites would have been overburdened with
symbolic state power, thus imposing on an already contested site a problem-
atic mesh of religious and state power.
One of the committee’s favorite targets was the Central Boulevard that
the Israeli planners had proposed. The boulevard would run from Mt. Sco-

172 Alona Nitzan-Shiftan

pus, the former Israeli enclave in East Jerusalem, to the national memorial
at Mt. Herzl in the far end of West Jerusalem, threading along its way two
academic campuses, the city center, and the government precinct. Connect-
ing the most important civil institutions and national monuments of Israel,
the Israeli planners saw the boulevard as making an urban statement express-
ing the role of Jerusalem as the capital of their state. To Lewis Mumford, the
boulevard, which would be wide enough to accommodate military parades,
showed that “the municipal authorities have been faithfully carrying out their
assigned duties in the spirit of Baron Haussmann, without realizing that it is
to Isaiah that they must look for guidance.” Isaiah, the biblical prophet whose
loving vision of Jerusalem Mumford contrasted to Haussmann’s Paris, sud-
denly emerged as the great hero of Jerusalem in its post-1967 incarnation.36
This was the kind of ethno-religious symbolism the plan’s authors had shied
away from. By proposing the Central Boulevard as a thread linking the civil
centers of the state, they hoped to create a dialogue between the symbols of
the Israeli state and those of the religious faiths represented in the Old City.
In their eªort to privilege representation over politics, the international
committee overlooked this important democratic distinction between reli-
gion and the state. In 1970 the other nation claiming Jerusalem was Jordan,
whose capital at Amman was far away. When Jordan withdrew its claims to
Jerusalem, in 1988, the consequences were great: after Jordan’s withdrawal,
the demand to make Jerusalem a capital for both the Palestinians and the
Israelis could no longer be denied. A separate and confined religious core that
contained all of Jerusalem’s symbolic resources might have encouraged the
Israeli and Palestinian states to develop their national institutions separately
while sharing the same symbolic nucleus. But that did not happen. On the
contrary, the institutional presence of the state at such sites— one could
cite Israeli military ceremonies that have taken place at the Western Wall, for
example—has created a predicament of long-lasting political impact.

orientalism and spirituality in brick and mortar

The team that authored the master plan considered the representational
demands of the international committee untenable. The Israeli team was
more geared toward convenience and e‹ciency, and therefore gave priority
to the symbolic function of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and to its oper-
ation as a contemporary city.37 They interpreted the Jerusalem Committee’s
criticism regarding the form and image of the city as being of a kind with
the attitudes of the former British colonials. They took this “British mandate

Modernisms in Conflict 173

imagery,” the aestheticization of which is described in Annabel Wharton’s
essay in this volume, with a grain of salt. In particular, they dismissed what
they considered to be an irrelevant enthusiasm for the exotic Orient, which,
to their dismay, was fascinating to the post-1967 War Israeli public as well.38
How, they wondered, could Israelis prefer insignificant Ottoman buildings
over the civic symbols of the “Unified Capital”? Identifying edifices like the
city walls as “Ottoman”—considered a decadent period in Zionist memory—
robbed the powerful image of “the walled city” of its potency (see fig. 7.7).
Advocating a vibrant central business district, a massive transportation
infrastructure, and a dense modernist city with identifiable urban boundaries,
the drafters of the plan intended to privilege Jerusalem’s civic values over its
religious overtones. They saw the criticism of the plan and its values as orig-
inating with the cultural disposition of their international critics, who repre-
sented the Christian aspiration for Jerusalem: a heavenly Jerusalem on
Earth.39 The Israelis felt that such an untenable aspiration would require the
planner to “provide a dramatic physical expression to the spiritual values of
Jerusalem. He has to physically plan houses, palaces, streets, squares, gardens
and boulevards that express ‘heavenly Jerusalem,’ embody her, and glorify
and elevate her spirituality.”40 The Israeli planners dismissed such ideas as emo-
tional naiveté that prevented foreign critics from recognizing Jerusalem’s needs
as contemporary city. Thus, they argued for a diªerent option that would rec-
ognize “the spiritual value of everyday life, which has to exist by moral vow.
This value overcomes the value of the naive urge to tie spiritual life with exter-
nal material expressions.”41 Intriguingly, by linking “this view [to] the spirit
of the Torah which emanated from Jerusalem,” they married their choice of
modernist planning to the Jewish mistrust of visual monumentality and its
emphasis on the sacredness of the every day.
Israeli planners thus mobilized a powerful strategy: they divested the com-
mittee’s criticism of its universality by locating its arguments within a West-
ern cultural context, despite the Jewish origins of many of the committee’s
members. They presented the critics’ demand that they design a townscape of
Oriental beauty as an idolatry that would undermine the tenets of the Jewish
religion. Taking just such a landscape as his object of inquiry, W. J. T. Mitchell
warned that it “becomes a magical object, an idol that demands human sac-
rifices, a place where symbolic, imaginary, and real violence implode on an
actual social space.”42 By locating his argument in the holy landscapes of Israel
and Palestine in the 1990s, Mitchell pointed to the immense power of aes-
thetics to escalate the conflict, just as Daniel Monk had demonstrated for
the Mandate period.43 More importantly, Mitchell also pointed out the dan-

174 Alona Nitzan-Shiftan

fig. 7.7. “The Approaches to Jerusalem.” Reprinted from Henry Kendall, Jerusalem:
The City Plan; Preservation and Development during the British Mandate, 1918–
1948 (London: H. M. Stationery O‹ce, 1948), 1.
ger of solidifying nationalism and imperialism in sanctified landscapes and
poetic geographies. The international committee’s encouragement of this
tendency would aid in just such a transformation of the urban landscape of
post-1967 Jerusalem. By objecting to the committee’s ideas, the authors of
the master plan aligned themselves not only with the values of Judaism, but,
more importantly, with those of the Israeli state.

religion, nation, and state

At an early session of the gathering, Yossi Schweid, one of the principal authors
of the original 1968 plan, indicated that he and his colleagues were operat-
ing according to the values upon which the Israeli state had been founded.44
In contrast, the Italian politician Bruno Zevi, an influential proponent of
organic architecture and a zealous Zionist, insisted that the “present plan [is]
an instrument against Israel,” and that “Jerusalem is something more than
[the] people living there.”45 Deeply involved in the discussion, he next
exclaimed: “This is collective hara-kiri. Everybody has abdicated. There has
been no eªort to have a new vision of life.”46 In the end, at the public session
of the entire subcommittee chaired by Louis Kahn and attended by the Israeli
planners and the press, it was agreed that the overall plan for the city should
highlight its importance as a religious center, a learning center, a capital city,
and a regional center, in that order.47 In one sentence, Kahn had reversed the
entire value system of the Israeli master plan: highlighting Jerusalem’s impor-
tance as the Israeli capital would no longer be the overriding objective of the
plan; that would only be the third objective on a list of four, with the city’s
importance as a religious center at the top.
Kahn’s reversal of the plan’s contested priorities highlights the tension
that existed between the diªerent parties who made claims on Jerusalem. In
their statements, the international invitees, as well as their Israeli hosts, made
constant reference to the city’s religious groups—Christians, Muslims, and
Jews—rather than to its political actors—the international community, the
Jordanians (later to be replaced by the Palestinians), and the Israelis. In so
doing, they disguised the national conflict over ruling Jerusalem by overem-
phasizing the pacifying spiritual realm of shared monotheism.
Rather then engaging with the great complexity of the city of Jerusalem,
the place in which they wished to situate their revised modernism, the invi-
tees limited their discussions to their own areas of expertise—architecture
and urban planning—and, as a result, their criticism was focused exclusively
on those aspects of the plan. They simply ignored the existing political ten-

176 Alona Nitzan-Shiftan

sions, and only critiqued the architectural and aesthetic implications of active
beautification.
What the Jerusalem Committee called for was a timeless vision for the
city. Such a vision should be based, the argument went, on Jerusalem’s spir-
itual and educational qualities, that is, on religious and historical motifs. The
demand to thematize Jerusalem was rife with complexities. Such a theme,
or narrative, had to be grasped by means of spatial configurations and visual
imagery. But whose narrative should Jerusalem’s image represent? The “cor-
rect” answer was the universal narrative of the three monotheistic religions.
This universal theme had to be internationally determined; this was exactly
the reason for convening the Jerusalem Committee.
Muslims, as was mentioned, declined to participate, since they felt their
participation would only serve to legitimize Israeli rule over Jerusalem. In
their absence, Kollek solicited other experts on the subject of Islam. Their
role was particularly crucial in the 1975 plenary session of the Jerusalem
Committee. Bernard Lewis, for example, the renowned orientalist scholar,
conducted the session on Jerusalem as a center for three religions. After the
presentations of Judaism and Christianity, Lewis explained that circumstances
had prevented the desirable presentation of Islam by a Muslim and then went
on to elaborate on the great tradition of Jewish scholars of Islam, conclud-
ing: “It is therefore a great tradition of detached objective and sympathetic
scholarship that the school of Islamic Studies in the university in this city
builds, and it is from this university that we draw our pseudo or crypto-Mufti
for this evening.” To suggest that an academic orientalist can articulate an
authorized Islamic position implies a view of Islam as mere religious essence,
which ignores its inextricable links to the political force of Arabs claiming
Jerusalem. This kind of “detached and objective” scholarship of “crypto-
Muftis” was attacked by Edward Said in his seminal work, Orientalism, writ-
ten in 1978. Lewis, Said’s most eminent scholarly rival, was one of the
consultants “protecting” the interest of Islam, which attests to the shortcom-
ings of this endeavor.48 The “monotheistic world,” minus its Muslim contin-
gent, consisted of Jews and Christians, whose respective international power
was grossly disproportionate to each other and to that of Muslims and whose
interests in an Israeli nation-state were also disproportionate.
Among Israeli Jews, those with growing nationalist tendencies happily
yielded to the committee’s aesthetic ideals for Jerusalem. Whereas post-1967
shifts in Israeli society are beyond the scope of this essay, it is su‹cient to say
that the pre-1967 modernist practices of the Israeli planning agencies fell short
when it came to symbolizing the metaphoric 1967 historical moment of a

Modernisms in Conflict 177

Jewish people returning to their biblical land. Moreover, many Israelis felt that
Jerusalem was their business card to the world. Refusing to see Jerusalem as
a highly modernist city seemed to be the only reasonable course, because
modernism would not be able to address the unique spatial qualities of the
Holy City, embedded as they are in an Oriental cityscape. According to Louis
Kahn, this was the only approach that could grant Israel “the spiritual right
to consider itself custodian of Jerusalem . . . from all others who consider it
their sacred city.”49
With such statements, we arrive at the crux of what Edward Said has called
“essentialist universalism,” a kind of historicism in which universalism as a
value is the exclusive right of Westerners.50 Israelis were allowed to join this
Western club only on the condition of complying with its rules. Of course,
this articulation of a universal ideal ignored the people who actually lived in
the city of Jerusalem, or those in the state of Israel for whom the city was
not only holy, but was also a civic center, an everyday city, and, more impor-
tantly, a city divided between two nations. The pressing demand to “thema-
tize” Jerusalem meant that the civic symbolism of the state had to be
subordinated to ethno-religious themes. The Israeli state, stripped of its mod-
ernist attire, had to symbolize its capital as a Jewish or, rather, monotheistic,
center in order to legitimize its cause.

the beautified city

When Israel turned to the West for legitimization, it had to accept an idea of
Jerusalem as a spiritual site of pilgrimage, as it had already been envisioned
by the British mandate that proceeded to translate nineteenth-century ori-
entalist depictions of the city into the language of modern town planning.
Attuned to his advisors, Kollek’s post-1967 project of beautifying Jerusalem
followed this course, which eventually led to a dramatic break with the devel-
opmental modernism that had hitherto predominated in the city. Visitors to
Jerusalem can easily appreciate the result of these eªorts: the greenbelt of
parks surrounding the Old City clearly privileges an orientalist visual image
as the overwhelming symbol of the city.
The visual control over the urban landscape image was enabled by the
institutional changes the committee provoked. One of the reports, “following
the Committee’s Second Plenary Session” in 1973, specified, for example, that
the city had “established a Municipal Ecology Section; rejected a number of
proposed high-rise buildings; expanded and continued work on the Jerusalem
Gardens; left the area outside the Damascus Gate undeveloped; listed 108 build-

178 Alona Nitzan-Shiftan

ings and 14 areas to be preserved, in the first stage of a city-wide preserva-
tion program; reduced the highway system described in the master plan and
instituted new tra‹c systems in the City’s center, and established a compre-
hensive planning exhibition, open to the public, in the Citadel.”51
This image advanced by these municipal measuresis echoed in many of
city’s preservation projects, such as the reconstruction of the Jewish Quar-
ter, the landscape design of the Sherover and Hass promenades on the south-
ern edge of the sacred basin, and the architectural design of projects like the
Mammila complex and the Hebrew Union College campus. Even the design
of the housing settlements in East Jerusalem, to which Kollek was opposed,
bore the mark of this identifiable post-1967 Jerusalem style.
The force of this restored urban landscape lies in its “matter-of-fact”
experience— or rather, in its obviousness, in the feeling that it was always
already there. It is exactly the landscape that Mitchell describes as verb rather
than noun—“a process by which social and subjective identities are formed.”

Landscape as a cultural medium has a double role with respect to something

like ideology: it naturalizes a cultural and social construction, representing
an artificial world as if it were simply given and inevitable, and it also makes
that representation operational by interpellating its beholder in some more
or less determinate relation to its givenness as sight and site. Thus land-
scape . . . always greets us as space, as environment, as that within which
“we” (figured as “the figure” in the landscape) find—or lose—ourselves.52

The landscape the committee sought for Jerusalem was one that would enable
Israelis not only to find themselves as a nation, but one that would allow West-
erners to find in Jerusalem their imagined geography of the Holy Land. It
was, thus, a landscape whose beauty was imbued with the colonial percep-
tion that brought to life, for Europeans, “the greatest collective landscape
mirage the human imagination has ever projected for itself.”53
Jerusalem’s projected landscape exists by a process by which “universal”
or “Israeli” Jerusalems are produced at the same time that the “Palestinian”
one is concealed. In identifying this process in Kollek’s beautification project,
I argue that the “know-how” for bringing it to fruition is lodged in the disci-
plinary knowledge of architecture, which thus has become an active partic-
ipant in the politics of space in Jerusalem. By way of conclusion, I will therefore
contrast this beautification project, that is, the normalization of a politically
charged aesthetic perception of the city, with the heated disciplinary discus-
sion that occurred on modernism and modernization.

Modernisms in Conflict 179

conclusion
Mayor Kollek had limited power in the arena of state politics. Turning to cul-
tural politics instead, he attempted to legitimize Israeli rule over Jerusalem
on moral and aesthetic grounds. The architects and planners of the Jerusalem
Committee, convened by him, were therefore entrusted with a strictly pro-
fessional mandate. While other plenary sessions of the Jerusalem Commit-
tee raised issues of a political nature, the sessions conducted by the architects
and planners enjoyed a professional aura, a practical edge, and an uncontested
credo. Intimidated by Jerusalem’s predicament, they preferred to remain
secure within their disciplinary knowledge, which emanated from the con-
temporary crisis of the modernist city.
The ensuing debate became a confrontation between developmental and
situated modernisms. At the time, development modernism was questioned,
in the context of some modernization projects that had devastated historic
urban patterns and had created e‹cient environments devoid of communal
identity and poetic expression. When the Jerusalem Committee criticized
the 1968 plan, it aimed to protect the city from such a destiny, not only in the
name of moral and aesthetic values, but in the name of humanism and dig-
nity. They argued that the systematic diagrams of the master plan failed to
demonstrate that people are far greater than statistical data awaiting func-
tional solutions.
The resultant focus of the international guests on the universal spiritual
and aesthetic values of the city consistently avoided the intricate relations
between the city’s image and its representation of the conflict. This was appar-
ent particularly in three domains of criticism. First, the denounced master
plan suggested a dual core for the city, which separated its historic and civic
centers. The committee favored instead a unified symbolic nucleus emanat-
ing its orientalist beauty onto the entire urban fabric, a proposal that under-
mined the democratic separation between state and religious faith, as well
as the potential of having two civic centers for two states with a shared sym-
bolic core. Second was the identification of the guests’ seemingly neutral quest
for urban beauty, with the British colonial conception of Jerusalem as a visual
idea in Western cultures. The oªended Israeli planners revealed the commit-
tee’s quest to prioritize urban beautification as what Edward Said would later
call an “essentialist universalism” that prepared Jerusalem’s landscape for its
Western audience.
Third was the issue of three faiths vs. two nations. The committee’s self-
imposed mandate of guarding the city by protecting its urban beauty meshed

180 Alona Nitzan-Shiftan

ethics and aesthetics. This was exactly the mind-set Mayor Kollek triggered
in 1969, when he invited the Jerusalem Committee’s world luminaries with
the following appeal: “The physical beauty of Jerusalem embodies the uni-
versal spiritual truths basic to all faiths and people. To enhance the natural
charm of Jerusalem is to make manifest a belief in the love of beauty and
the desire for peace inherent in all mankind.”54 At the outset, granting aes-
thetics such moral weight was predicated on a conception of a city of three
monotheistic faiths, each containing a mosaic of ethnicities, rather than a city
that could potentially become a capital for two rival peoples. This seemingly
neutral position, which granted all faiths a share in the city’s sanctity, evoked
colonial policies that spatially regulated the city according to religious
a‹liation.55 For Kollek, the plurality of his “mosaic policy” was a way to under-
mine Palestinian claims in the name of a wishful cosmopolitanism under
Israeli custody.56 International critics succumbed to this view because what
the three religions shared was the city’s symbolic core, the image of which
embodied their imagined Jerusalem. By insisting that this visual idea would
aªect the entire city, they believed they could combat what they perceived
to be the anticipated ugliness of developmental modernism, and thus secure
the Jerusalem they sought.
The resultant committee’s demand to “thematize” Jerusalem, that is, to
ethnicize its image, has left Arab claims unaccounted for while forcing and
enforcing Jerusalem’s “sanctity” on Jews. The historical moment of conflict
between these two modernisms unraveled a remarkable reversal: foreign crit-
ics further entangled the Israeli state in its constitutive bind, the subordina-
tion of civic symbolism to ethno-religious themes, while the modernist Israeli
planners moved away from such an overtly symbolic emphasis.
Failing to recognize the spatial politics embedded in administrative plan-
ning and everyday functioning for a contested city, the foreign critics threw
out the baby—the 1968 master plan—with the bathwater. The result of the
alternative focus on urban design was a sense of beauty that elevated the spirit
of selected members. For others, beautified Jerusalem presented “ landscape
as a place of amnesia and erasure, a strategic site for burying the past and
veiling history with ‘natural beauty.’ ”57

notes

This essay is part of a manuscript in preparation, tentatively titled “Designing

Politics: Architecture and the Making of ‘United Jerusalem.’ ” It is based on my

Modernisms in Conflict 181

doctoral dissertation at MIT (2002). I would like to thank Mark Jarzombek, Stan-
ford Anderson, and Sibel Bozdovan for their critical role in developing this project.
1. Teddy Kollek to Lewis Mumford, March 26, 1969, Mumford Archive, Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
2. The three meetings took place in the first decade following the war
(1967– 77). The archival research on the plenary meeting of 1978 and the activ-
ity of the Jerusalem Committee thereafter are beyond the scope of this essay.
3. For writings on Zionist/Israeli planning, see S. Han Troen and Noah Lucas,
Israel: The First Decade of Independence (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), and Haim
Yacobi, Constructing a Sense of Place (in Hebrew) (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2004);
see also Zvi Efrat, The Israeli Project (Tel Aviv: Tel-Aviv Museum of Art, 2004),
and Yehuda Shenhav, Merhav, Adamah, Bait ( Jerusalem: ekhon Van-Lir; Tel-Aviv:
Ha-Kibutz Ha-Meuhad, 2003).
4. For post–World War II architectural culture, see Joan Ockman and Edward
Eigen, Architecture Culture (New York: Rizzoli, 1993), and Sarah Williams Gold-
hagen and Réjean Legault, Anxious Modernisms (Montreal: Candian Centre for
Achitecture; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000).
5. The term “developmental” refers to studies of high modernism (see, e.g.,
J. C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), and
Wolfgang Sachs, The Development Dictionary [London: Zed Books, 1992]). The term
“situated” is borrowed from Goldhagen’s account of Louis Kahn, who was the
most influential architect of the Jerusalem Committee (S. W. Goldhagen, Louis
Kahn’s Situated Modernism [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001]).
6. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage
Books, 1992).
7. The subcommittee analyzed four documents: the 1968 Master Plan for
Jerusalem; the Outline Townplanning Scheme for the Old City and its Environs;
A Plan for the Central Business District; and the Jerusalem Transportation Plan
for 1985.
8. Arthur Kutcher, The New Jerusalem (London: Thames & Hudson, 1973), 88.
9. Abraham Rabinovich, “Planners under Fire,” Jerusalem Post, December 25,
1970, 20.
10. The Jerusalem Committee: Proceedings of the First Meeting, 13.
11. A. Rabinovich, “Leading World Architects Meet in Jerusalem,” Jerusalem
Post, December 18, 1970, 5. The single holdout was a Jew from Berlin, who refused
to visit Jerusalem as long as it remained occupied.
12. Fuller quoted in Avrahami, “Jerusalem’s Not So Golden Plan,” 210; see
also A. Rabinovich, “Idealized Jerusalem at Engineers Congress,” Jerusalem Post,
December 17, 1970, 8. On Fuller’s ideas, see Meier, “Planning for Jerusalem.”

182 Alona Nitzan-Shiftan

 13. A. Rabinovich, “Leading World Architects Meet in Jerusalem,” Jerusalem
Post, December 18, 1970, 5.
14. The term Neu Sachlichkeit is usually translated as “the New Objectivity” (see
Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture [New York: Oxford, 1980], 130–148). For
the development of the debate on urbanism in the modern movement, see Lewis
Mumford, The Ciam Discourse on Urbanism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000).
15. Avrahami, “Jerusalem’s Not So Golden Plan,” 209.
16. The planners employed a large, multidisciplinary team of architects, plan-
ners, geographers, and economists, who entered into four years of intensive, full-
time work. Among the workers and consultants were graduates of planning
schools in the United States who had previously worked in Washington, D.C.,
on problems pertaining to social and ethnic conflict. They enlivened the local dis-
course of urban planning with talk about new methodologies. The planning team
was unique, in that its composite institutional structure, made up of profession-
als from many disciplines, prevented the rule of any single interest. It regularly
conducted two sets of meetings, corresponding to the two hierarchical tiers of
ministerial o‹cials from the various participating government agencies. The
team produced numerous interim reports that testify to the consistency of their
approach. Many of these reports can be found in the library of the Ministry of
Housing. The final document, which contains much more visual material, per-
haps as a result of the Jerusalem Committee’s criticisms, was ultimately presented
in 1968, and was published in Hebrew in two impressive volumes in 1972 and 1974.
Those who worked on the plan still consider it one of Israel’s most impressive
planning documents ever. A list of the team members can be found in David Kroy-
anker, Jerusalem ( Jerusalem: Zmora-Britan, 1988).
17. For that plan, see Aryeh Sharon, Physical Planning in Israel. For Sharon’s
English account of its making, see “Planning a New Land,” in Sharon, Kibbutz +
Bauhaus (Stuttgart: Kramer Verlag, 1976), 76–95.
18. During early statehood, a national campaign that privileged rural settle-
ment was prevalent. The shift of focus toward urban forms was greatly influenced
by the Israeli eªort to unite East and West Jerusalem in 1967. For the role of the
city in Zionist culture, see Erik Cohen, The City in the Zionist Ideology.
19. See Aviah Hashimshoni et al., 1968 Jerusalem Masterplan ( Jerusalem: Jeru-
salem Municipality, 1972), 1:9–15.
20. Ibid., the entire plan.
21. Louis Kahn quoted in Abraham Rabinovich, “Planners Under Fire,” Jeru-
salem Post, December 25, 1970, 20.
22. W. von Eckardt, “Jerusalem the Golden.”
23. Amos Elon, “Jerusalem as a Gas Station Sacred to the Three Religions,”

Modernisms in Conflict 183

Haaretz, December 14, 1970, 8. Elon’s remark was made in response to the release
of the transportation master plan, prepared by the Ministry of Transportation
in collaboration with the Jerusalem master plan o‹ce.
24. Ari Avrahami, “Planning for Change,” a sidebar in Avrahami, “Jerusalem’s
Not So Golden Plan,” 215.
25. Yoseph Schweid, one of the master plan’s authors, had already voiced this
concern, at the 1968 Symposium on the Image of Jerusalem: “With all due respect
to the noble sentiments of the large part of the civilized world who sees in this
country a possession that needs to be treated as a preserve—we do not see our-
selves as living on a preserve. There are landscapes in this country which require
museam guard. But our first consideration must be the actual needs of life in this
country” (see Avi-Yona et al., “A Symposium on the Image of Jerusalem”).
26. Teddy Kollek quoted in Meier, “Planning for Jerusalem,” 57.
27. Wolf von Eckardt, “Summing Up a Period,” a postscript to Kroyanker,
Jerusalem, 452.
28. Tamar Eshel Archive in Jerusalem’s Municipal Archive, City Hall, Jerusalem.
29. Louis Khan quoted in Abraham Rabinovich, “Planners Under Fire,”
Jerusalem Post, December 25, 1970, 20.
30. Fascist Italy and Kemalist Turkey are famous exceptions.
31. Aldo van Eyck quoted in Smithson and Team X, Team 10 Primer, 15.
32. Some examples of writings of great influence in this debate are: Rudolf
Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (London: Warburg
Institute, University of London, 1949);Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture without
Architects; (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1964); Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Native
Genius in Anonymous Architecture (New York: Horizon, 1957); D.W. Thompson,
On Growth and Form (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1961).
33. See Stanford Anderson’s account of disciplinary memory in connection
with the work of Louis Kahn: “Memory in Architecture (Erinnerung in Der
Architektur)” (Daidalos 58 [1995]: 35).
34. See Moholy-Nagy, Native Genius; Rudofsky, Architecture without Architects;
Smithson and Team X, Team 10 Primer.
35. Alexander, “A City Is Not a Tree.”
36. Another example of this kind of thinking occurred during the first ple-
nary session of the Jerusalem Committee, when Judge Hayim Cohen confessed
his admiration for the prophet who celebrated the city as one would celebrate a
lover (see H. Cohen, “Eternal Jerusalem,” in The Jerusalem Committee: Proceedings
of the First Meeting, 9–12).
37. Hashimshoni et al., 1968 Jerusalem Masterplan, 49.
38. For the British fascination with the Orient, see Fuchs, “Representing

184 Alona Nitzan-Shiftan

Mandatory Palestine.” For the return to the British colonial paradigm, see Nitzan-
Shiftan, “Israelizing Jerusalem.”
39. The team made no mention of Christianity in particular. However, the
notion of “heavenly Jerusalem” is a clear and erroneous reference to Christian
tradition, in which “heavenly Jerusalem” is an abstract notion devoid of corpo-
real expression. For the notion of “heavenly Jerusalem” in Christian culture, see
Prawer, “Christianity between Heavenly and Earthly Jerusalem.”
40. Hashimshoni et al., 1968 Jerusalem Masterplan, 11.
41. Ibid.
42. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Holy Landscape,” 5 (electronic version).
43. Daniel B. Monk, An Aesthetic Occupation (Durham,N.C.: Duke University
Press, 2002).
44. Yehuda Ha’ezrahi quoted in Avi-Yona et al., “A Symposium on the Image
of Jerusalem,” 38.
45. Tamar Eshel Archive.
46. A. Rabinovich, “Jerusalem Committee Repudiates Master Plan,” Jerusalem
Post, December 22, 1970, 8.
47. Ibid.
48. Bernard Lewis introduced “Dr. Wilson, who teaches Arabic literature at
the Hebrew University and who is the author of a number of writings on the
subject” (see The Jerusalem Committee: Proceedings of Third Plenary Meeting, 13). For
the debate between Lewis and Said, see Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pan-
theon, 1978). For a response, see “The Question of Orientalism” in Lewis, Islam
and the West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 99–118.
49. “U.S. Architect Says: Faulty Presentation.” Jerusalem Post, December 25,
1970, p. 5.
50. Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered.”
51. See The Jerusalem Committee, “Background Information,” 1978, in the
Jerusalem Municipal Archive.
52. W. J. T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1994), 1–2.
53. Mitchell, “Holy Landscape,” 2.
54. First letter of invitation from Teddy Kollek to Lewis Mumford, March 26,
1969, Mumford Archive, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Similar letters
were sent to all the members of the Jerusalem Committee.
55. For the transition from Ottoman to British rule, see Salim Tamari.
56. For further discussion of Kollek’s “mosaic policy,” see Roger Friedland and
Richard D. Hecht, To Rule Jerusalem (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
57. Ibid.

Modernisms in Conflict 185

8 Palestinian Remembrance Days and Plans
Kafr Qasim, Fact and Echo

waleed khleif and susan slyomovics

In memory of Waleed Khleif, who died of cancer on July 31, 2006

E ven when facts are not in dispute, some people want to remember,
others want to forget. When facts are in dispute, the divide between
those who want to remember and those who want to eªace widens.
How are memories and commemorative practices metonyms for the larger
Palestinian predicament, in particular for Palestinians’ rights as citizens of Israel
and for Israel’s responsibility to its Palestinian Arab population? Azmi Bishara,
the Palestinian Israeli philosopher, asserts in a much-quoted statement: “There
could not begin to be an equality until stones mark the graves of what were
once villages, nor an historic compromise until Palestinians obtain their
tombstones; the victim must be recognized in order for him to forgive.”1 In
Bishara’s succinct aspiration for a solution are subsumed a series of neces-
sary steps: an accommodation to alternate historical truths,2 a recognition
of Palestinians as victims, the restoration of their former sites of habitation
(if only as memorials, according to Bishara’s radical proposal), and, finally,
the victim’s right of choice to accept or refuse these processes. Indeed, the
first memorial to the contested history of the Palestinians and Israelis was
erected, in the form of a monument near Sakhnin in the Galilee, to mark
“Land Day” and to commemorate six Palestinian Israelis killed in 1976 dur-
ing protests of Israeli seizures of Palestinian land.3 The monument has been
described as “a watershed of identity and memory, when the Palestinian iden-
tity of the Arabs in Israel started to gain presence in the public space.”4 The
right to place memorials dedicated to the eradicated Palestinian past within

186
Israeli public space is an example of the notion of “historical justice,” defined
in recent historiography as an alternate, sometimes parallel path. Unlike solu-
tions to problems between nations that are resolved in conventional, court-
room-centered, criminal justice venues, historical justice assumes that the
act of recognizing and acknowledging an historical truth is itself a form of
justice.
In this essay, using the lengthy, contested historical struggle of Palestini-
ans in Israel as background, we focus on how architecture (local and inter-
national design competitions), ritual (annual commemorations), and public
performance (especially poetry and the erection of monuments) have been
enlisted as ways to revise entrenched historical accounts about the Palestin-
ian past within Israel.5 Following James Young’s definitions as applied to Holo-
caust memorials, we find it useful to “distinguish a memorial from a
monument only in a broader, more generic sense.”

There are memorial books, memorial activities, memorial days, memorial

festivals, and memorial sculptures. Some of these are mournful, some cel-
ebratory: but all are memorials in a larger sense. Monuments, on the other
hand, will refer here to a subset of memorials; they are the material objects,
the sculptures and installations used to memorialize a person or a thing. . . .
A memorial may be a day, a conference, or a space but it need not be a mon-
ument. A monument, on the other hand, is always a kind of memorial.6

While some commemorative monuments have appeared in Palestinian Arab

villages within Israel, many projects remain plans; they represent the will to
build with scant hope of realization. This is spectacularly so for the proposed
memorial to the 1948 Israeli massacre of Palestinians at Deir Yassin, on a site
opposite to and within view of Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Museum to Holo-
caust Victims.7
As a case study, our essay focuses on the 1956 massacre at Kafr Qasim and
on the ways in which the memory of the massacre and of the victims is kept
alive. The massacre occurred on Thursday, October 29, 1956. On the eve of
the 1956 Sinai campaign, shortly after 5:00 p.m., Palestinian citizens of Israel
from the village of Kafr Qasim—men, women, and children—were return-
ing home at the end of the workday, unaware that a curfew had been
declared during their absence, when they were shot by units of the Israel
Defense Force charged with protecting Israel’s border. The majority of the
workers were killed at the western entrance to Kafr Qasim, a few in the cen-
ter of the town, and some to the north of the town center. This last group,

Palestinian Remembrance Days and Plans 187

known as the “women’s group,” consisted of fourteen women, a boy, and
four men. Over time, at each of the locations where the Kafr Qasim villagers
were murdered, a variety of ephemeral gestures and site-specific installations
have appeared. We analyze these eªorts at commemoration constructed by
the inhabitants of Kafr Qasim, including the creation of Palestinian art, mon-
uments, and performances that have been shaped by the massacre. Thus, in
the aftermath of Kafr Qasim, we have chosen to study Palestinian Israelis’
and Jewish Israelis’ symbolic and ritual gestures. These performative mani-
festations reveal past and present issues of culpability, the power of memory
and memorializing, the civic motivation of the Palestinian minority popula-
tion to erect monuments, the public acceptance of moral responsibility, the
acknowledgment of wrongdoing that is communicated between opposing
parties, and the nature of the historical truth that governs relations between
Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Israelis.8

kafr qasim: post-1948 history and the 1956 massacre

During the Israeli-Jordanian armistice talks that began on March 4, 1949, Jor-
dan ceded a strip of territory designated by Israeli historiographers as the
“Little Triangle.” As a result of the cession, approximately 20,000 Palestinian
Arabs living in fifteen villages, among them Kafr Qasim, were added to the
Jewish Israeli population (see fig. 8.1).9 The historian Benny Morris had pro-
vided an account of the political and military conditions that existed in the
Triangle and of how Israeli plans to expel those Arabs on the Israeli side of
the cease-fire line were disrupted:

There was apparently no “clean” way to pressure the Arabs into leaving.
The inhabitants of Baqa al Gharbiya, At Taiyiba, Qaqun, Qalansuwa, Kafr
Qasim, At Tira and the Wadi ‘Ara villages stayed put. As [Moshe] Sharett
[Israel’s Foreign Minister from 1948 to 1954] put it on 28 July: “This time . . .
the Arabs learned the lesson; they are not running away. It is not possible
in every place to arrange what some of our boys engineered in Faluja [where]
they chased away the Arabs after we signed an . . . international commit-
ment. . . . There were warnings from the UN and the U.S. in this matter. . . .
There were at least 25– 30,000 . . . whom we could not uproot.10

Until 1967, the village of Kafr Qasim was situated at a distance of only one
kilometer from Israel’s eastern border with Jordan, at the easternmost point
of what was once thought of as Israel’s beten rakhah (soft underbelly)—the

188 Waleed Khleif and Susan Slyomovics

fig. 8.1. 1949 Map of the Little Triangle: Kafr Qasim (in shaded area) ceded to Israel.
Adapted from the Survey of Palestine, by the Palestine Land Society, London, 2002,
and Salman Abu Sitta. Reproduced by permission of Salman Abu Sitta.

densely populated, narrow coastal strip of Israel that extended only fifteen
kilometers, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordanian border. The Pales-
tinian villages on both sides of the border share specific legal and sociocul-
tural features. On the Israeli side, however, inhabitants of the Little Triangle
are neither refugees nor “present absentees” (defined as Palestinians who are
internal refugees, displaced from their original homes and lands but still resid-

Palestinian Remembrance Days and Plans 189

ing within the borders of Israel). On the Jordanian side, the United Nations
Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA) does not classify border villagers as
refugees.11 Nonetheless, Palestinians on both sides of the 1949 Israel-Jordan
armistice boundary lost considerable agricultural land to Israel, depending
upon which side of the border they found themselves. Palestinians living in
Jordan were dispossessed of their lands by the new lines of partition, and Pales-
tinian Israelis were dispossessed as a result of land expropriation by the state
of Israel under succeeding emergency regulations that promoted Jewish set-
tlements along Israel’s borders with Jordan as strategic defense units.12 The
Kafr Qasim villagers, as dispossessed farmers on the Israeli side, were trans-
formed into low-wage laborers.13
Since 1948, according to the ethnographic account of anthropologist Abner
Cohen, Kafr Qasim has exemplified what Cohen calls the “border situation.”
The term is useful for understanding subsequent Israeli discourses about respon-
sibility for crimes and indemnities, as these govern future relations between
Arab and Jew in Israel. According to Cohen: “A distinct category . . . are vil-
lages, which (a) lie literally on the most strategically sensitive part of the [Israeli-
Jordanian] border, (b) are cut oª by that border from close associate villages,
only a few miles away within Jordan, (c) are in intense interaction with the Jews
in Israel with whom they have great economic interests, and (d) are seriously
caught up in the strife between Israel and the Arab world.”14 The larger pat-
tern of “intense interaction” between Arab and Jew that Cohen identifies
inevitably owes much to the Palestinians’ intertwined experience of massacre,
trials, reconciliation, pardon, memory, and monuments that is the story of Kafr
Qasim, even though most Arab villages in Israel, Cohen avers, can be regarded
as border villages.15 Certainly, Kafr Qasim’s geographical location close to a
contested, militarized border contributed to the ensuing tragedy. Benny Mor-
ris notes that between 1949 and 1956, Israel’s “free-fire policy” prevailed along
the border and resulted in a series of “atrocities,”16 as well as contributing to
the massacre that led Palestinian Israelis to conclude that their expulsion, or
worse, was imminent.17 A hint of their worst fears (which requires an as yet
unwritten, thickly descriptive ethnography of the culture of fear among Pales-
tinian Israelis during the 1950s) is oªered by Abd at-Tamam, a Palestinian Israeli
artist from Kafr Qasim, who recalls having lived through the 1956 events, when
he was twelve years old, that continue to inform the content of his paintings.
When asked by an interviewer, “Who buried the dead?” at-Tamam replied:

People from the neighboring village of Jaljulya. We were in our houses.

They brought people from Jaljulya to dig the graves. They were frightened.

190 Waleed Khleif and Susan Slyomovics

 They were told that each one should dig a grave. They thought [the graves]
were for themselves. We learned this afterward. On that same day impris-
oned [in our homes] we didn’t know. They took the notables to identify
the bodies. It was a shocking thing, a man whose two sons went to work
and did not return and he threw aside the cover, looked and saw that it was
his son. The people of Jaljulya buried them twenty centimeters in the
ground. After this, people dug and brought out the bodies from the graves
and buried them again.18

Abd at-Tamam’s testimony highlights a significant aspect of the earliest post-

massacre moments. Palestinians feared that they were literally being forced
to dig their own graves, a situation that resonates uncomfortably with geno-
cidal techniques elsewhere. The closure ritually and traditionally enacted
between legitimate mourners and a dead body was disrupted by Israeli dis-
missal of burial practices, to the degree that any Palestinian, not a family
member, might act as a gravedigger and mourner. The Kafr Qasim villagers’
immediate response, after an enforced hiatus of two days before they were
even permitted to approach the cemetery, was to reclaim their dead from shal-
low graves dug in haste and fear and to re-inter the bodies on their own terms.
This was described to us by interviewees as a collective act of resistance, meant
to assuage wounds and reclaim normal funerary rites. As with burial sites in
distant lands, for the Palestinian diasporic dead, the Kafr Qasim cemetery
became the first site permitted to display commemorative monuments, in
the form of graves and headstones etched with the word “Martyr” (see figs.
8.2 and 8.3). Since that first year, the space of the cemetery, the headstones,
and the annual ceremonies anchor, sustain, and inspire subsequent projects
that build upon and spread outside of the spatial confines of both Muslim
sacred and Israeli state-approved burial grounds in order to scatter physical
markers of the massacre throughout the town.
But in the beginning there was fear, confusion, and ignorance, compounded
by the villagers’ forced confinement in their homes in the aftermath of the
massacre:

There was imprisonment [in our houses]. People could not go out. I heard
neighbors shouting: “Has yours returned?” “Did your father return?”
Those who stayed outdoors died. After two, three days, I don’t remember
exactly, the notables arrived and went from house to house and asked for
hoes and axes. The more older adults knew immediately that this was to
dig graves. People knew that whoever did not return home, had died. After

Palestinian Remembrance Days and Plans 191

fig. 8.2. Entrance to Kafr Qasim Martyrs’ Cemetery. Photo by Susan Slyomovics.

fig. 8.3. Kafr Qasim Cemetery, 2006 project to paint the martyrs’ graves green. Photo
by Susan Slyomovics.
 two days, they permitted people to go to the cemetery to know the vic-
tims. There were some who thought that all the people in the village had
died so they ran away. There were wounded people in the hospital. I saw
no woman screaming or shouting, none weeping or shedding tears. A kind
of dryness. An interior pain. No words. No words whatsoever. People sat
and looked at each other.19

In general, when we speak of gestures of apology, accountability, and truth

telling, roles are assigned designating certain persons or governments as per-
petrators who need to acknowledge wrongdoing, while at the same time
describing the situation of those who were set upon as victims. Kafr Qasim
is not only an extreme case, but an exemplary one: it is anomalous because
these Palestinian villagers remained in their ancestral homes and homelands,
but it is characteristic because their agricultural lands were taken away. Res-
idents of Kafr Qasim were neither Palestinian refugees nor “present absen-
tees” within Israel, yet after the massacre they were o‹cially, symbolically,
and legally recognized as victims of the state of Israel. The people of Kafr
Qasim remained in their home territory after 1948 (despite subsequent land
expropriations to establish a neighboring Jewish settlement), exhibiting what
Palestinians in Israel term thabat ( generally defined as an immoveable, quiet,
physical force of nature, when a peasant unreflectively stays put, grips the
land, and refuses to leave). In contrast, when Kafr Qasim became nationally
and internationally known as an example of the state’s violence against its
own citizens, after the 1956 massacre, articulated as fundamental to the new
vocabularies and strategies for Palestinian Israelis in the 1960s was the notion
of .sum[d: a purposeful, nationalistic struggle with the same end of staying
put physically on the land that evolved into marking this struggle publicly.
Thus, Ibrahim Sarsur, head of Kafr Qasim’s municipal council during our 1998
fieldwork, insists from hindsight that the massacre in his village had the unin-
tended consequence of dispelling the culture of fear that pervaded the lives
of Arabs in Israel, certainly for himself, born after the massacre, and that it
had thereby contributed an emotional and moral force to the samidin who
stayed put:

The massacre of Kafr Qasim completely liberated the inhabitants of Kafr

Qasim, especially the young, from the tight manacles of military rule in
the 1950s and 60s. The young stopped being afraid and decided to trans-
form the first memorial day to the massacre, organized in 1957, as a sign

Palestinian Remembrance Days and Plans 193

 of the beginning of the struggle against fear and suspicion from military
rule, from its representatives and from all of its activities in Kafr Qasim
and outside.20

The conceptual shift from thabat to .sum[d does not reveal itself easily through
overt actions, such as a mass reburial, but it does signal, if not help lay the
foundations for innovative collective history-making processes and architec-
tural planning. While the notion of .sum[d has received much attention in lit-
erary and historical analyses of Palestinian-Israeli confrontations, and although
.sum[d is a consequence of violence, to be emphasized are its nonviolent and
creative realizations in Kafr Qasim, embodied in conceiving and erecting
memorializing projects. Certainly, in the early years after the massacre, the
ways in which both sides understood the pursuit of peaceful relations
diªered, as military trials interspersed with a ceremony of reconciliation
unfolded. Questions arise concerning the ways in which the Israeli pursuit
of justice through the military courts is compatible in any way with Israel’s
declared pursuit of reconciliation. In turn, what are the ways in which the
immediate village reburial transforms traditional Muslim gravesites at the Kafr
Qasim cemetery into national Palestinian monuments? What public and polit-
ical events have emerged dynamically in the lives of Palestinians and in rela-
tion to Israeli gestures based on the pivotal moment of the massacred,
twice-buried, annually commemorated Palestinian body?

israeli state responses: military court trial,

compensation and .sulh. a (ceremony of reconciliation)
After a year-and-a-half-long, highly publicized military trial (lasting from Jan-
uary 15, 1957 to October 16, 1958), and two years after the shootings in Kafr
Qasim, eleven members of the Border Police, including the battalion com-
mander, Major Shmuel Malinki, were sentenced to lengthy prison terms. In
contrast, in a second, swift military trial, the responsible brigade commander,
Issachar Shadmi, was convicted of a minor administrative oªence and sen-
tenced to pay a fine equivalent to a penny.21 All the convicted border police-
men were freed after three years, having received presidential pardons or
administrative reductions of their sentences, which were served in a Jerusalem
sanitorium and not in prison. Lieutenant Gabriel Dahan, found guilty of killing
forty-three citizens, was sentenced to seventeen years. He too was freed after
three years, to be rehabilitated and appointed in 1960 as an o‹cer for Arab

194 Waleed Khleif and Susan Slyomovics

aªairs in the nearby municipality of Ramleh. When Dahan retired, Kafr Qasim
villagers reported to us that his newest assignment was as a security guard
in the shopping mall at Rosh ha-Ayin, a nearby Jewish settlement that had
been built on expropriated Kafr Qasim agricultural lands. The initial Israeli
response to the massacre relied on criminal law, although the criminal process
was limited and suborned by amnesties for all the perpetrators. Nonetheless,
the Kafr Qasim trials establish a clear legal precedent in Israeli civil and mil-
itary law that following orders or transmitting the order to shoot is su‹cient
grounds for determining guilt if murder is the consequence, even if the trans-
mitter of those orders to shoot does not have murderous intentions. Follow-
ing such legal terminology, a black flag had been raised, and thus a “partnership
in crime” is invoked.22
On November 10, 1957, a year after the massacre, but in the midst of the
first trial, a Public Committee, hastily formed to consider compensation for
the wounded and slain of Kafr Qasim, indemnified inheritors of the slain. An
exception was the one pregnant victim, Fatimah Salih Sarsur, whose family
was allotted an additional 1,000 pounds, “in consideration of the fact that she
was in the last days of her pregnancy at her death.”23 Fatimah and her unborn
child represent both a real and a symbolic instance of contestation between
Arab and Jew. During the trial, testimony was presented by sixteen-year old
Hana Sulayman Amir, a survivor of the massacre, who described the killings
of seventeen people in the third group of women. Hana’s testimony, after she
repeated the words of the two Israeli o‹cers as they confronted and then shot
the pregnant Fatimah, continue to resound in text and image: O‹cer Shmuel
Malinky said to Sergeant Shalom Ofer, “Kadur ehad maspik” (A single bullet
is su‹cient).24 Fatimah’s fecund female life, cheaply and easily dispatched, was
cut short as she was about to produce a child, part of a future generation that
fuels Jewish fears about high Arab fertility and low Jewish birth rates, in the
ultimate demographic war between Arab and Jew.25 One bullet, two lives
expended, and a penny fine for fifty lives relegated Palestinians to abuse by
the dominant culture and left them unable to defend their own land and homes.
Another consequence of Fatimah’s death is that the number of Palestinians
killed by the Israeli Border Police continues to be a figure in dispute: Israelis
acknowledge thirteen injured and forty-nine dead, whereas Palestinians count
fifty dead because they include as a fiftieth victim the unborn child carried by
the pregnant Fatimah. At the base of the monument and fountain con-
structed inside the municipality complex in 1973, the people of Kafr Qasim
memorialized the fifty dead with forty-nine white headstones inscribed with

Palestinian Remembrance Days and Plans 195

the names of the dead; the fiftieth remains starkly blank (see fig. 8.4). Adel
Badir, our tour guide and a member of the commemoration committee,
explained the choice of a fountain with water: life continues like a stream and
because all the water in the monument flows upward to one source, symbol-
izing that the fate (masirah) of all the victims, even the unborn, was the same.26
In the rush to supply tidy endings, the Public Committee’s report ended
with a recommendation to both sides to set up a .sulh.a ceremony in Kafr Qasim,
at government expense, as soon as possible and “in accord with customary
Arab tradition” (be-hetem la-masoret ha-’aravit ha-mekubelet).27 The recon-
ciliation ceremony and the financial compensation report were intimately
related in time and content. On November 20, 1957, more than a year after
the Kafr Qasim massacre, a mere seventeen days after the Public Committee’s
recommendation and in the midst of the first trial, a ceremony staged by Israeli
authorities in the village of Kafr Qasim was designated by Israeli authorities
with an Arabic word, .sulh. a, which in the Arabic-speaking world denotes a cer-
emony of reconciliation. The .sulh. a is a much-studied sociocultural event in
Western and Israeli anthropology. Israeli anthropologist Abner Cohen under-
took fieldwork in 1958, not long after the massacre in Kafr Qasim.28 Cohen’s
village descriptions are especially important to appreciate the contrasting Arab
and Jewish viewpoints of the subsequent trial, reconciliation eªorts, and indem-
nities that resulted from the massacre; Cohen illustrates the diªerences
between Jewish Israeli justice and “Arab justice,” the latter being a term applied
by Cohen to complex Palestinian and Arab juridical institutions such as sulh
(reconciliation) and .sulh. a (reconciliation ceremony), as they were conducted
among Kafr Qasim’s hamulahs (village clans). Cohen concludes that “Perhaps
the most serious divergence between Arab concepts of justice and those implicit
in Israeli legislation is the abolition, in Israel, of the death penalty. This abo-
lition runs counter to the Arab notion of justice based on retribution, although
allowance is made in Arab justice for the payment of blood money.”29 Elimi-
nating the death penalty, however, is no guarantee that the state will not find
other means to execute its citizens: witness the killings at Kafr Qasim. It seems
possible that Israel’s Arabists, many of whom are and were responsible for
ruling over as well as studying the Arab population, share Cohen’s fieldwork
conclusions that “Disputes are not regarded by [Arab] villagers as settled until
indigenous procedures of arbitration and reconciliation took place. Often the
[Israeli] police themselves helped in setting these procedures in operation. In
some of the cases the police were requested by the villagers not to take the
disputants to courts, when the matter was settled according to ‘Arab Justice.’”30
Given that Cohen’s fieldwork took place a year after the Kafr Qasim massacre,

196 Waleed Khleif and Susan Slyomovics

his ahistorical research findings are strikingly oblivious to the reasons why Pales-
tinian villagers in Israel, under military rule from 1948 to 1964, preferred local
legal controls to the Jewish Israeli courts. Nonetheless, how to account for the
spectacle of an Israeli government appropriating and financing traditions of
Arab justice? Moreover, Ibrahim Sarsur informed us during our 1998 visit that
he and other inhabitants had come to see this .sulh. a as a response to a wrong-
ful murder, powered by the need to cover up by denial and betrayal. Sarsur,
repeating the experiences of his parents’ generation, corroborated Abd at-
Tamam’s story of the terrified Jaljulya gravediggers brought to bury the Kafr
Qasim victims while their families remained under house detention, but
Sarsur also maintains that the planning for the .sulh. a ceremony, forced upon
the villagers, was long intended, perhaps from the horrific moment when
the village mukhtar was brought to identify the dead bodies of his villagers,
and then discovered among the dead the corpse of his own son, and turned
to the o‹cer in charge: “Why was my son killed? What did he do?” The mil-
itary governor replied: “Tomorrow you will eat savEh [an eggplant and chick-
pea dish] and everything will work out.”31
Sarsur’s description of the .sulh. a is a powerful testimony of the event:

The food was prepared, the food was not eaten. Village inhabitants and a
small part of the victims’ families were brought to a tent erected in the
only village school. During the forced .sulh. a, notables participated from
neighboring Arab villages that were an integral part of the regime’s rule
in the State of Israel. The media reported that the .sulh. a was conducted
according to the best of Arab tradition. The massacre, according to this defi-
nition, was kind of a quarrel of village clans that ended in a .sulh. a, food,
drinks, peace. Ben-Gurion needed a s.ulh.a before the end of the trial of the
murderers, a .sulh.a that supposedly enabled him to make a deal with Malinki
and the rest of the soldiers: after the inhabitants of Kafr Qasim forgive,
there is no reason for the murderers to remain in jail. “It is a moral obliga-
tion to free them,” Ben-Gurion claimed. The second reason for Ben-
Gurion wanting a .sulh. a is that it would “release” the Israeli government
from any further responsibilities towards the victims. . . .
From many conversations I have had with victims’ families it emerges
that pressure was applied to them and strong threats including threats of
deportation and being fired in order that they should participate in the .sulh.a
process. Until today, in Kafr Qasim, there is no one who agrees with the
manner of treatment of the government of Israel concerning the massacre
and its consequences.32

Palestinian Remembrance Days and Plans 197

The s. ulh. a, that is, the true Arab reconciliation ceremony, publicly mediates
disputes among and between individuals, families, and clans; the s. ulh. a is not
intended to resolve conflicts between persons and governments. Yet the
conundrum remains: since Arab justice in Israel is devalued by Israeli Jew-
ish views of the Arab population, for whom did the Israeli government organ-
ize the Kafr Qasim s. ulh. a, and why? Not for the mourning familieswho were
forced to attend and participate in their degradation, Sarsur insists.33 A con-
temporary newspaper account ends with the words of Hamdelelullah Sar-
sur, a son of one of the victims: “Not one member of the bereaved families
would come to the proposed s. ulh. a with the man standing trial for killing
43 [sic] villagers. He charged that the villagers were ‘forced’ to sign in favour
of the Rashish Committee finding.”34 Is this an instance of the state of Israel,
while encountering the Arab native as the embodiment of an eªaced past,
romanticizing useful fragments of Arab culture to be embraced for the
moment (e.g., during a s. ulh. a)? Is there a culinary parallel in the journalist’s
report that “an Arab-style meal was served by Shekem, the Israeli army cater-
ing organization”?35 Can the state of Israel simulate, or does the state mock,
Arab justice for the Arabs? Israel’s leaders reproduced early anthropologi-
cal “culturalist” views of the Arab world, in which Israel’s own culturally
constructed stereotypes keep non-Western groups as frozen representatives
within unvarying societies that are resistant to historical time and contexts.
So, too, the Western and Israeli scholarly interest in the Arab hamulah (the
clan system) is similarly theorized as a static, internally coherent social sys-
tem, unaªected by the external impact of colonialism.36 Linked to hamulah
studies are detailed descriptions of the s. ulh. a, viewed by anthropologists as
a parallel mode of social control achieved by means of a set of relation-
ships among the patrilineal Arab clan system. A potent mix of orientalism,
the weight of Israeli military rule and administrative control over Arabs in
Israel, and crude pressure on the Kafr Qasim families to participate under-
lies the discourse of a s. ulh. a as a process toward healing and reconciliation.
Although the Israeli government appropriated Arab juridical terms and
traditions, the villagers of Kafr Qasim explained to us that at least they were
able to endure the ceremony and gain ironic relief from Ashkenazi Jewish
Israeli mispronunciations of s. ulh. a that mistakenly transformed the middle
consonant “h” (the voiceless pharyngeal fricative) to “kh” (the voiceless uvu-
lar fricative). Thus, s. ulh.a (reconciliation), whenever articulated by Jewish Israeli
voices during the ceremony, was heard and understood by Kafr Qasim vil-
lagers to mean sulkhah, which means “a butchery” and “a flaying.”37 Shared

198 Waleed Khleif and Susan Slyomovics

notions of political and historical truths or, minimally, a shared consensus
between the two opposing groups were strikingly absent. For the villagers
of Kafr Qasim, there was no dearth of evidence that customary social and
cultural institutions and relations (kinship network, clan system, legal modes
of maintaining social peace) were not stable, unadulterated systems operat-
ing in a peaceful context, but systems profoundly altered by conflict, terror,
and high-intensity threats. There was no reconciliation and no peace during
the s. ulh. a, but instead Sarsur describes a slow, painful butchery, as if the par-
ticipants were being skinned alive again.

a first memorial: palestinian poetry

Open your gates, O our village

Open them to the four winds
And let fifty wounds glow with fire.
Kafr Qasim,
A village dreaming of grain, violet flowers,
And flocks of pigeons:
“Mow them all down in one full sweep,
Mow them down.”38
They mowed them down.
..............................
If only I buried all the dying words,
If only I had the strength of the cemetery’s silence,
O you the hand that plays music, O shame for fifty strings,
If only I could write my history with a scythe,
My life with an axe,
And the song of a lark.39

In the felt absence of meaningful justice and restitution for Kafr Qasim’s dead,
and as a counter-performance to the trial and the s. ulh. a, Palestinian poets and
Arabic poetry perform the roles of judge, historian, teacher, and memoirist
of the massacre. Tawfiq Tubi, then a member of Israel’s Knesset as a repre-
sentative of the Communist Party, recounted during our interview that on
November 7, 1956, a week after the massacre, he decided to break the
silence.40 The first newspaper article about the events appeared on Novem-
ber 23, in al-Ittihad, the Arabic-language newspaper of the Israeli Commu-
nist Party. Authored by Tubi in the form of a mudhakkarah (a term denoting

Palestinian Remembrance Days and Plans 199

both a memorial and report), the article was widely distributed, appearing
eventually as a separate pamphlet in Arabic, Hebrew, and English.41 The Pales-
tinian poet Tawfiq Zayyad spoke with Tubi, who provided details and fresh
accounts, indeed the closest thing to an eyewitness, his being a parliamentar-
ian who arrived a few days after the massacre. Zayyad, in turn, met with a
close circle of poets and friends. The poem, as the first memorial, emerged
immediately after the 1956 massacre, whereas monuments were not erected
until 1973; thirteen years after the massacre, villagers still fearful of building
their first architectural statement on the actual site of the massacre, instead
placed the sculpture in the town core, adjacent to the main municipality build-
ing, instead of at the stated preference for a monument, on the specific sites
of the massacre (see fig. 8.4).42
While physical memorials beyond the cemetery walls had to wait, poetry
emerged to articulate the archive of written and oral testimony. Annually,
poetry is declaimed and accompanied by a procession through the village that
stops at the massacre sites and ends at the cemetery, for prayers and the plac-
ing of wreaths. According to Waleed Khleif, his generation of Palestinian Arab
writers (in their teens and twenties the year of the massacre) derived poetic
inspiration from the Ittihad article authored by Tawfiq Tubi, and from
Zayyad’s account to Khleif and his fellow poets about what Tubi saw. The
mantle of the poet as the conscience of the community was first taken up
by Tawfiq Zayyad. Zayyad produced a malham1h, a heroic cycle consisting
of four poems,43 dated November 1956, a few weeks after the event, although
the poems were to be later performed only at the first anniversary of the mas-
sacre, a year after their composition, in November 1957, in the courtyard at
Mary’s Well, the central plaza of Nazareth. Khleif, who was present to read
his poetry, recalls an audience of more than five thousand people. The occa-
sion, the content, and the style of Zayyad’s cycle heralded the beginnings of
“the literature of resistance” (adab al-muq1wam1h).44 Traditional romantic
poetry—as practiced in Palestine, for example, by Jamal Qawar, Michael Had-
dad, and Yusuf Nakhleh—is complemented by another vision from a new
generation of writers, those living fi-al-d1khEl (inside)—the Palestinian Arab
inhabitants of the state of Israel after 1948 who became renowned through-
out the Arabic-speaking world for voices committed to politically engaged
poetry. Zayyad’s poem, “On the Trunk of an Olive Tree,” presents the olive
tree as a symbol of communal rootedness, identity, and resistance. The poet
values the tree for a diªerent kind of materiality. Denied a voice and paper
and pen to publish, the poet proclaims novel uses for the olive tree, appro-
priate to the Palestinian struggle, which permits him to “carve all that has

200 Waleed Khleif and Susan Slyomovics

 fig. 8.4. 1973
monument and
fountain in
Municipality
Square, with
a blank head-
stone for the
fiftieth victim
of the massacre.
Photo by Susan
Slyomovics.

happened/all my secrets/on an olive tree in the courtyard of the house/I shall

carve my story and all the seasons of my tragedy, my sighs.” Poetically, the
poet’s personal attachment to the tree and its deep and long-living roots in
the soil, as the steadfast bond, sum[d, between Palestinians and the land have
been invested with heightened symbolic meanings. For poets, the common-
place in the material environment permits both the writing of the message
and the sending of a message to the world, mediated by the tree. As have
other Palestinian poets, Zayyad has kept his promise: “I shall carve Kafr Qasim
I will not forget/I shall carve Dayr Yasin, rooted in memory.”
Although a first-anniversary commemoration was held in Kafr Qasim,45 it
is the second-anniversary event commemorating the massacre, on October
27, 1958, which produced poems speedily memorized throughout the Arabic-
speaking world. Only during the second year were details of the trials and

Palestinian Remembrance Days and Plans 201

descriptions of perpetrators and victims made available to the public. Pub-
lished court proceedings allowed poets of the resistance generation to imag-
ine that the massacre had actually taken place before their eyes. No one from
the village of Kafr Qasim, which lies approximately sixty kilometers from
Nazareth, attended the early commemorations, since the Israeli Military Laws
in eªect from 1948 to 1964 prohibited Arabs within Israel from traveling from
their o‹cially designated residences without permits. Likewise, every year
memorial ceremonies for the dead were held in the Kafr Qasim village ceme-
tery, although in the early years, as villagers recount in interviews, each third
week of October, Israeli authorities declared the village a closed area, an action
that prevented outsiders from entering.
Because the villagers of Kafr Qasim could not attend the memorial ser-
vice held on their behalf in Nazareth without violatiing Israeli military law,
a group of poets—namely, Mahmud Darwish, Tawfiq Zayyad, Waleed Khleif,
Salim Jubran, Samih al-Qasim, Issam Abassy, and Hanna Abu Hanna—drove
by car to participate in the local Kafr Qasim village ceremonies in 1958. On
the spot where many of the villagers were killed—where a large memorial
tombstone would eventually be erected for the twenty-third anniversary of
the event, on October 20, 1979, and renovated for the fiftieth anniversary in
2006 (see fig. 8.5)—the delegation of poets joined other villagers in the f 1tihah.
Khleif recounts that they all walked to the village cemetery where the vic-
tims were buried. Ali Ibrahim al-Ali, the shaykh and imam of Kafr Qasim
led prayers for the souls of the dead. The procession of men and women
stopped at the three additional spots where their kin had been killed, then
gathered at the main square. The Israeli authorities permitted a religious
ceremony and silent procession, but forbade any speechmaking. Standing
on a raised platform, the first and only poet able to speak was Waleed Khleif.
He began, “Will Kafr Qasim be forgotten and the blood of the victims in
vain be sh[ed]?” (Kafr qasima nansa wa-dammu al-dahaya sudan yuh—
[rahku]?). Khleif recalls that in mid-syllable of the first line of his poem, while
pronouncing the word “shed,” multiple club blows rained down upon him
from more than 250 Israeli security police who were monitoring the pro-
cession.46 The delegation of poets was hustled into a border police command
car, beaten with swagger sticks, jailed together for less than a week, and fined.
Charges of illegal entry into a closed military area and inciting a riot by inflam-
matory speech—all without a military permit—were eventually dropped.
While in Bet Lid prison, the poets continued their poetic speechmaking and
declaimed and created more poetry. Poems, never uttered in Kafr Qasim
before their intended audience, were subsequently published in al-Ittihad.

202 Waleed Khleif and Susan Slyomovics

The poetry of those poets who were briefly imprisoned together—Mahmud
Darwish, Samih al-Qasim, and Hanna Abu Hanna—is politically focused,
anchored in the reality of oppression and the experience of persecution,
and this poetry illumines facets of Arab life in Israel in the 1950s. Mahmud
Darwish’s poem, “al-Qatil raqm 48” (“Victim Number 48”) was set to music
by Marcel Khalifeh in 1972 and became a popular hit song throughout the
Arabic-speaking world.47 Darwish’s poem is about Fathi Uthman Isa, who
was twelve years old when he was shot and killed along with other mem-
bers of his family. His body was found on a rock farthest from the entrance
to the village and at some distance from where the others were killed. Thus,
Fathi was one of the first to die, and he was garlanded with roses and the
moon, romantic items borrowed from Palestinian folklore to describe the
magical world of childhood:

They found in his chest a garland of roses and the moon

while he lay discarded, dead on a rock.
They found in his pocket some pennies,
they found a matchbox, and a travel permit,
on his arm freshly-drawn tattoos.
When his brother grew up and went searching for work
in the city markets,
they imprisoned him.
He was not carrying a travel permit,
He was carrying a tattered satchel
and some other boxes.
O children of my country,
this is how the moon dies.

In Mahmud Darwish’s poem, “Uyun al-mawt1 al1 al-abw1b” (“The Eyes of

the Dead on the Doors”),48 the victims’ eyes, wandering restlessly and
unburied through the village and through our consciousness, are represented
metaphorically as the “ten candles” of the ten dead boys and girls. Darwish
pointedly asks, How is it possible to speak about massacred children?

What do you bring to the ten candles that lit up Kafr Qasim,
Only more hymns about doves
and skulls?
They don’t want and we don’t repeat
our laments, they don’t bargain

Palestinian Remembrance Days and Plans 203

 the commandment of shed blood seeks our help to resist.
At night, they knock on every door,
each door, every door,
they beg not to heap earth on their precious blood.
Their eyes, extinguished, address us to castigate:
“Do not bury us with dirges, but keep our memory steadfast,
so that we may prepare your night for the glitter of new light.”
O Kafr Qasim,
from the victims’ co‹ns, a banner raised shall proclaim:
Stop, stop,
stop and think.
No, no, do not yield to shame.
You have been billed to repay debts exacted by the storm
as shadows fall.
O Kafr Qasim.
we will not sleep as long as you have your cemetery and nightfall
and the commandment of shed blood is not to be forgotten
and the commandment of blood calls for our help
so that we may resist.

Darwish’s poem has been directly incorporated into the annual commemo-
rative performances in Kafr Qasim. On the evening of October 29 each year,
a gathering is held outdoors and attended by dignitaries. Forty-nine children,
each of them dressed in black and bearing torches, march on to the stage.
Behind them, the master of ceremonies reads the names of the dead; as each
name is read, the child carries the torch, douses it, and leaves the stage. At
the end of the reading of the names, the stage is in utter darkness and silence
is preserved.49

palestinian poetry, performance, and memorials

Samih al-Qasim, in the poem “Li-y1din dhall1t tuq1wim” (“To a Hand that
Still Resists”), includes quiet funeral obsequies and private laments to mourn
what happened at Kafr Qasim. Here, the poet conveys his reaction when he
first arrived at the village:

Then I came.
Your trusting children welcomed me
We recited the fatihah.

204 Waleed Khleif and Susan Slyomovics

 In your children’s eyes,
O you women with wounded eyes,
the river is dried out, and the doves’ song is dead
while I, O Kafr Qasim,
I grant no dirges to the dead, but praise
the hand that still resists.

Al-Qasim’s poem concludes with words to his fellow Palestinians, playing with
the echo of a well-known folk proverb: “KhellEh f E-al-qalb yijr1h wal1 bayn
an-nas yifd1h” (Let it continue wounding the heart, never let it be exposed
to people). He proposes an alternative: Were this wound to remain in the
heart for generations, waiting the day to emerge, al-Qasim the poet, in con-
trast, will not be silenced. His rhythmic proclamation, the village name
chanted three times, is linked to the blood of its victims, who will one day
bring about a future resistance movement:

All that we said is insignificant,

what is inside the heart remains in the heart
from one generation to the next.
Until the river resurrected
and the doves burst into songs
Then I fill the universe with relentless screams:
Kafr Qasim
Kafr Qasim
Kafr Qasim
Your blood is still unavenged
But we shall resist.

The Palestinian Israeli poet Hanna Abu Hanna tells how an individual, even
among the fifty dead, not only counts to those who love and grieve, but also
evokes anguish that endures for days, weeks, years, and decades. Each vic-
tim’s death possesses a unique history and form, yet of what import were
the fifty massacred? Abu Hanna asks and answers these questions:

How can we forget the bitterness of our past

and in the present narrate our tragedies
and still we have chains choking us
as betrayal moves quickly to banish what remains of us?
.............................

Palestinian Remembrance Days and Plans 205

 How can we forget the bitterness of our past
and how our present still proclaims our tragedy?

How our present still proclaims our tragedy, Abu Hanna insists. Kafr Qasim
stands metonymically, the physical attached to its referent, a part standing
for the whole, for the many fates of Palestinians since 1948. For Palestinian
poets within Israel, Kafr Qasim is within the culture of resistance, the refusal
to go into exile, the injunction to stay and build with the quality of steadfast-
ness required of those remaining on the land. Poets employ a poetic conceit
in which they make poetry about their silencing, while the martyr’s voice,
muted by death, is never stilled and still cries out to us. For the dead of Kafr
Qasim, and for those who continue to mourn, martyrdom has forged yet one
more strong and chilling connection with the home village: Al-sha’b yuth-
but (The people stay put). This connection means, however, that only the
dead are certain to remain, as corpses buried where they belong in their ances-
tral village. Is it only then, Abu Hanna muses, that we can speak of Palestini-
ans safely of the soil and in the homeland?
Poetry and memorializing have taken divergent paths. Poems preceded
monuments and memorials historically in time. An early Samih al-Qasim
poem about the Kafr Qasim massacre depicts only words as memorials, with-
out any material monument or commemorative marker:

No monument, no flower, no remembrance

Not one poetic verse, no curtain,
No blood-soaked rag from a shirt
Worn once by our innocent brothers
No stone with names inscribed on it
Nothing, O the shame!
Their ghost still circling
Dig up their graves in Kafr Qasim’s ruins.50

Al-Qasim’s poem, composed in the 1950s, documents the early facts but not
the subsequent memorializations: the memorials built in the 1970s within the
city hall complex; the memorial at the old village entrance constructed in
1976, on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary; the memorials at the ceme-
tery; the well-attended annual services; the 1973 memorial, renovated and
enlarged in 2006; the addition of a large monument created by Ibrahim Hijazi,
a sculptor from Haifa, in the shape of a torch, gesturing to Darwish’s poem
of the martyr as candle (with the flame under construction as of this writ-

206 Waleed Khleif and Susan Slyomovics

ing, in 2006); and the youth project to paint all the martyrs’ co‹ns green, so
their numbers and location are visually prominent to mourners (see fig. 8.5).
At the diªerent sites of the massacre throughout Kafr Qasim there are memo-
rials, plaques, and monuments in constant states of conception, construction,
and renovation, while, until recently, visitors who approached the main vil-
lage entrance from the highway were greeted by these words on a billboard:
“Kafr Qasim, Bal1d al-sh[had1” (Kafr Qasim, Village of Martyrs).

why the kafr qasim massacre does not fade away

After it was evident to you little by little the details of that horrific deed,
After it was revealed to you the darkness, its size, stripped bare like a
monument,
You viewed in contrast the government communiqués, the announce-
ment of the “wounded,” the vague pallid announcement,
You didn’t know even if it was intended for them . . . because of the
abyss between the horrific facts and the echo.51

At the forty-first anniversary, in 1997, the then minister of tourism Moshe

Katsav was present to voice an apology as a representative of the Israeli gov-
ernment. Kafr Qasim’s then mayor Ibrahim Sarsur told us that he countered
by calling on the government to return 6,000 dunams (1,500 acres) of confis-
cated village lands, a request that was never implemented. Justice minister
Yossi Beilin reiterated the government position, “that Israel could not take
responsibility for the massacre, saying that the government at the time did
not order the shootings.”52 Even as attempts to force government recogni-
tion persisted, as early as the 1980s the people of Kafr Qasim voted to set aside
precious land for a memorial park with sculptures. Architectural plans
depicted a multipurpose building, to include a cultural center, archives,
museum, and facilities for visitors (see fig. 8.6).
Twenty years after the ceremony, in 1986, to lay the cornerstone for the
planned museum and archive site, and as part of the fiftieth commemora-
tion ceremony on October 29, 2006, a permanent space for exhibiting the story
of the 1956 massacre was finally dedicated and inaugurated. It did not con-
form to the municipality’s original architectural vision; nevertheless, histor-
ical displays, maps, photography, books, and artwork found a home in the
new Community Center (Merkaz KehEl1ti) for the municipality of Kafr Qasim,
subsidized by the Israeli state (see figs. 8.7 and 8.8).53
Notable among the many artifacts at the museum is Abd at-Tammam’s

Palestinian Remembrance Days and Plans 207

fig. 8.5. Memorial tombstone erected for the twenty-third anniversary of the massacre,
October 20, 1979, and then renovated for the fiftieth anniversary in 2006. In front of the
memorial tombstone, on the tra‹c roundabout, a statue of a torch with flame was under
construction during the fiftieth anniversary year. Photo by Susan Slyomovics.

iconic painting of the single penny, the derisory fine levied against one of
the perpetrators. The painted penny formerly hung behind the mayor’s desk;
as of the October 26, 2006, opening ceremonies, it is housed in the section
of the museum designed by Shlomo Khayat, the architect of the building,
intended for the gymnasium and workout rooms. In December 2006, when
Susan Slyomovics interviewed Khayat, who was born in Egypt and is also a
planner and a landscape designer (he was educated at Cairo’s School of Archi-
tecture and also the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris), he listed the design chal-
lenges he faced once he had been hired to build the center. Before Khayat
undertook the Community Center assignment, in 2001, this project of an
edifice consecrated to the 1956 massacre had begun when the municipality
arranged for a 2,000–square-meter, poured concrete platform for the pro-
posed site. Further construction, after the building foundations were laid,
was halted due to lack of money. Instead, by 2003, funding amassed from
various Israeli ministries and government agencies helped pay to complete
the building, but according to strict, state-mandated guidelines that regulate
all community centers within Israel and include complex templates for

208 Waleed Khleif and Susan Slyomovics

fig. 8.6. Architectural plans for a multipurpose building to commemorate the mas-
sacre, with a cultural center, archives, museum, and facilities for visitors. Courtesy
of the Kafr Qasim Municipal Archives.
fig. 8.7. Memorialization of the forty-nine martyrs, at the entrance to Kafr Qasim Com-
munity Center, 2006. Photo by Susan Slyomovics.

fig. 8.8. Architectural plans for the Kafr Qasim Community Center, courtesy of Shlomo
Khayat, Khayat Architects, Jerusalem. Instead of sports room (studio guf ), the ground
floor houses the museum.
fig. 8.9. Aerial view of Kafr Qasim Community Center, 2003. Courtesy of Shlomo
Khayat.

budget, architectural plans, landscaping, as well as the function, allocation,

and use of interior and exterior spaces (e.g., daycare facilities, parking, ter-
races, classrooms, auditoriums, gymnasium, etc.). Since Kafr Qasim already
had a sports center nearby, as well as a senior citizen center, the municipal-
ity re-purposed a section of the ground floor of the Community Center.
Khayat informed Slyomovics that he was unaware of the first floor trans-
formation from athletic rooms into a small museum devoted to the “ living
memory” of the 1956 massacre, a reuse of space completed in time for the
fiftieth-anniversary ceremonies in 2006 (see fig. 8.7). Nor had he seen, at the
time of our interview, the addition of forty-nine ceramic dishes shaped like
sunflowers and bearing the names of each martyr, as if they were headstones
lining the entrance (see fig. 8.9).
Perhaps Kafr Qasim’s persistent museum-making (to the extent of trans-
forming interior spaces within Israel’s state-mandated architectural structures)
bears some relationship to the political activism of Ibrahim Sarsur, a former
mayor of Kafr Qasim and leader of a branch of the Islamic Movement of Israel
headquartered in Kafr Qasim. He ran for a parliamentary seat during Israel’s
March 2006 elections, advocating one united party representation for the 20
percent of Israel’s population that is Palestinian. His platform, to protect
Arab villages from land seizures and improve school and job opportunities,

Palestinian Remembrance Days and Plans 211

employed the slogan: “Rights are not given. They are taken.”54 For Sarsur
and for the people of Kafr Qasim, the stories of Arabs and Jews in Kafr Qasim
from 1948 until today, especially the books, sculpture, commemoration days
and anniversaries, architectural plans, even poetry—all understood in this
essay as various memorializing operations—are not detachable from the daily
lives of Palestinian since the establishment of the state of Israel. The ways
in which the Palestinian Arab minority of Israel chooses to enshrine national
and group memory have evolved dynamically, but also in relation to Israel’s
institutional forms of architecture, construction, and remembrance. Pales-
tinian Israelis in Kafr Qasim have created memorials, a small museum, and
commemorative holidays to drive home certain national lessons: first and fore-
most, to stay put, as the samidEn of Kafr Qasim have done; second, to create
a shared national experience embodied in material ways to bind successive
generations as the generation of the massacre dies out; third, to articulate a
Palestinian historical perspective that diªers from prevailing Jewish Israeli
ones; and fourth, to reconstruct memory in performance-based enactments
and architectural forms as one task for Palestinian Israelis in their journey
for the recognition of their rights as citizens.

notes

This essay belongs to our larger project on the Kafr Qasim massacre (see the review
by Hossam Abou-Ela, in Al-Ahram Weekly, April 15–21, 1999, available at weekly
.ahram.org.eg/1999/425/cu1.htm. Unless indicated, translations from the Hebrew
and Arabic are by Waleed Khleif and Susan Slyomovics. We are grateful to Ibrahim
Sarsur, Adel Bedir, and Adnan Taha of Kafr Qasim, as well as various members
of the municipality. We thank Shlomo Khayat for his generosity with informa-
tion, architectural plans, and photographs. For readings and comments, we are
grateful to Kamal Boullata, Tamar Katriel, Salman Abu Sitta, and Ruth Iskin.
1. Azmi Bishara, “Representations of the ‘Other’ in Israeli Culture,” presented
at the conference on “The ‘Other’ as Threat: Demonization and Anti-Semitism,”
June 12–15, 1995, Hebrew University, Jerusalem.
2. Here, the term “alternative historical truths” evokes the work of revision-
ist historians; see, e.g., Benny Morris, “The New Historiography: Israel Confronts
its Past,” Tikkun 3, no. 6 (1988): 19–23, 99–102.
3. Kamal Boullata, “Facing the Forest: Israeli and Palestinian Artists,” Third
Text 7 (1989): 77–95.

212 Waleed Khleif and Susan Slyomovics

 4. Tamer Sorek, “Memory and Identity: The Land Day Monument,” ISIM
Newsletter 10 (2002): 17.
5. For excellent studies of the broader historical and political background,
which is not our focus here, but upon which we have relied, see Hillel Cohen,
‘Arvim tovim ( Jerusalem: Keter, 2006); Rubik Rozental, ed., Kefar kasem: Eru’im
ve-mitos (Tel Aviv: ha-Kibuts ha-Me’uhad, 2000); Shira Robinson, “Local Strug-
gle, National Struggle: Palestinian Responses to the Kafr Qasim Massacre and Its
Aftermath, 1956–66,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 35 (2003): 393–416;
and Shira Robinson, “Commemoration Under Fire: Palestinian Responses to the
1956 Kafr Qasim Massacre,” in Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North
Africa, ed. Ussama Makdisi and Paul A. Silverstein (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 2006). Robinson’s observation, made in both of the essays cited here,
that “it is di‹cult to find a Palestinian poet who has not written about the mas-
sacre,” serves as our own point of departure.
6. James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 4.
7. Daniel A. McGowan and Marc H. Ellis, eds., Deir Yassin Remembered: The
Future of Israel and Palestine (New York: Interlink, 1998).
8. The scholarship on memory in relation to both Jewish and Arab gestures
and acts concerned with the massacre is vast. In this essay, Waleed Khleif looks
at Palestinian Israeli experiences through works of poetry, and Susan Slyomovics
examines place and material culture. See also Susan Slyomovics, The Object of Mem-
ory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998).
9. Benny Morris, Righteous Victims (New York: Knopf, 1999), 249–52.
10. Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 249.
11. According to Shadia Matar, “A Palestinian refugee is a person whose nor-
mal residence was Palestine for a minimum of two years preceding the conflict
in 1948, and who, as a result of the conflict, lost both his home and his means of
livelihood and took refuge in one of the countries where UNRWA provides relief
( Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, West Bank, Gaza)” (Shadia Matar, “Palestinian Refugees,
a Material and Spiritual Homeland” [in Italian], Mediterranean: Un Mare di Donne,
no. 3 [http://www.medmedia.org/review/numero3/en/art7.htm]).
12. On the Israeli government’s confiscation of land from its Arab citizens,
see Menachem Hofnung, Democracy, Law, and National Security in Israel (Alder-
shot, U.K.: Dartmouth, 1996).
13. See Henry Rosenfeld, “Processes of Structural Change within the Arab
Family,” American Anthropologist 60 (1958): 1127– 39; Henry Rosenfeld, “From Peas-

Palestinian Remembrance Days and Plans 213

antry to Wage Labor and Residual Peasantry: The Transformation of an Arab vil-
lage,” in Process and Pattern in Culture, ed. Robert A. Manners (Chicago: Aldine,
1964).
14. Abner Cohen, Arab Border-Villages in Israel (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester
University Press, 1965), 17–18.
15. Ibid., 17.
16. Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, 1949–56: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation, and
the Countdown to the Suez War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 432– 34.
17. On “Plan Mole” (Miftsa’ Hafarforet), an army program for Israel’s Bor-
der Patrol to execute the “transfer” (expressed in English) of Arabs from the Tri-
angle in case of war with Jordan, see Tawfiq Tubi, Kafr Qasim al-majzarah
wa-al-’ibrah (Tel Aviv: Israeli Communist Party Publications, 1996), 77.
18. Ariella Azoulay, Ekh zeh nireh lekha? (Tel Aviv: Babel, 2000), 140.
19. Ibid., 139–40.
20. Ibrahim Sarsur, “Beyn ha-s.ulh.a veha-andarta,” in Kefar kasem: Eru’im ve-
mitos, ed. Rubik Rozental (Tel Aviv: ha-Kibuts ha-Me’uhad, 2000), 199.
21. Transcripts in Hebrew of the trial are published in Moshe Kordov, Ahat
esreh kumtot yerukot ba-din: Parashat Kefar-Kasm (Tel Aviv: A. Narkis, 1959).
22. Nor would the military trial of soldiers serve as a deterrent to future hos-
tilities, despite a famous verdict by Israeli judges (who were borrowed for the
army trial from the civil court system) that condemned “manslaughter by army
personnel” (in Hebrew, “harigah ‘al yidey ish tsava’ ”), asserting that soldiers must
refuse “a patently illegal order that carries a black flag of criminality.” The “black
flag criterion” of Kafr Qasim was evoked five years later, in 1961, during a more
internationally famous trial, when Israeli judges condemned Adolf Eichmann
to death for his role in exterminating European Jews. On the concept of “the
black flag,” see also Rozental, Kefar kasem, 117– 77; and Leora Bilsky, “Kufr
Qassem: Between Ordinary Politics and Transformative Politics,” Adalah’s
Review 3 (2002): 69–80.
23. The full report of the Public Committee (known as the Rashish report,
after Pinchas Rashish, mayor of Petah Tikvah) appears in Rozental, Kefar kasem,
237– 39; see also “Four Hundred Attend Sulha at Kafr Qasim,” Jerusalem Post,
November 21, 1957, 1, 3.
24. Hana Sulayman Amir’s testimony was recounted by Ibrahim Sarsur
(interview, Kafr Qasim, January 13, 1998).
25. See Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh, Birthing the Nation: Strategies of Palestinian
Women in Israel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
26. Interview with Adel Badir, Kafr Qasim, January 13, 1998.
27. “Report of the Public Committee for Indemnities to the Dead and

214 Waleed Khleif and Susan Slyomovics

Wounded of Kafr Qasim, Petah Tikvah, 10 November 1957,” in Rozental, Kefar
kasem, 239; see also Robinson, “Commemoration Under Fire”; and Robinson,
“Local Struggle, National Struggle.”
28. See Cohen, Arab Border-Villages in Israel; Abner Cohen, “Hamula,” Ency-
clopaedia of Islam, 3:149–50. Although Cohen renamed the pseudonymous Tri-
angle village Bint el-Hudud (Arabic for “Daughter of the Borders”), he noted that
“the whole village had been in mourning for the many villagers who had been
killed in an incident two years earlier” (87). Cohen’s ethnography is a transpar-
ent document, his disguise purportedly confected to protect his informants and
their locations, and it should be reread in terms of the legal fallout from a sup-
pressed legacy of civilian dead. On the identity of the village where Cohen did
his fieldwork, see Dan Rabinowitz, Antropologyah veha-Palestinim (Raananah, Israel:
Institute for Israeli-Arab Studies, 1998), 93–117.
29. Cohen, Arab-Border Villages in Israel, 135.
30. Ibid., 139–40, note 3.
31. Sarsur, “Beyn ha-s.ulh.a veha-andarta,” 198.
32. Ibid., 199. For a diªerent description, see Lea Ben-Dor, “Marginal Column,”
Jerusalem Post, November 22, 1957, 1.
33. Interview with Ibrahim Sarsur, Kafr Qasim, January 13, 1998.
34. “Kafr Kasim Counsel Reject Terms of Payment,” Jerusalem Post, Novem-
ber 18, 1957, 3.
35. “Four Hundred Attend Sulha at Kafr Qasim,” Jerusalem Post, November
21, 1957, 3.
36. For critiques and overviews of Western and Israeli anthropology on the
hamula, see Talal Asad, “Anthropological and Sociological Studies on the Arabs
in Israel: A Critique,” Journal of Palestine Studies 6 (1977): 41– 70; Talal Assad,
“Anthropological Texts and Ideological Problems: An Analysis of Cohen on Arab
Villages in Israel,” Economy and Society 4 (1975): 274; Elia Zureik, The Palestinians
in Israel: A Study in Internal Colonialism (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1979);
and Aziz Haidar, The Palestinians in Israel: Social Science Writings (Kingston,
Ontario: NECEF Publications, 1987). See also Gil Eyal, “Beyn mizrah le-ma’arav:
Ha-si’ah ‘al ha-kfar ha-’aravi bi-yisra’el,” Teoriya u-Bikoret 3 (1993): 39–55. Eyal
contrasts the current discursive objectification of the Arab village (which pro-
duced harsh military-rule policies) by Jewish Israelis with the pre-1948 state period,
which romanticized the Arab village as a locus for an authentic Jewish identity
rooted in biblical ways. See also Susan Slyomovics, The Object of Memory (Philadel-
phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), chap. 3.
37. Interviews with Ibrahim Sarsur and Adel Bedir, January 1988, Kafr Qasim.
38. Darwish quotes a soldier’s orders, “Mow them down,” taken from pub-

Palestinian Remembrance Days and Plans 215

lished trial transcripts, to describe the killing of a group of thirteen village men,
who were lined up and then shot.
39. In 1958, Mahmud Darwish composed a shi’ir malhami (heroic poem), in
six parts, about the massacre at Kafr Qasim. The excerpts reproduced here are
from the first poem in the cycle, entitled “Mughanni al-damm” (Acre: Dar Hijazi
li-al-nashr, 1967); the translation appears by written permission of the author.
40. Interview with Tawfiq Tubi, December 1998, Haifa. For an English-lan-
guage account of the event and for trial transcripts, see Sabri Jiryis, The Arabs in
Israel (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976), 140–53.
41. Tubi, Kafr Qasim al-majzarah wa-al-’ibrah, 31 (for mudhakkarah, see 34–44).
42. Group interview with municipal counselors, Kafr Qasim, January 13, 1998.
43. See Tawfiqu Zayyad, “Kafr Qasim,” in Kalimat muqatilah (Acre: Matba’at
al-Jalil, 1970), 86–101. In the same collection there is another poem about Kafr
Qasim and Dayr Yasin, entitled “On the Trunk of an Olive Tree”; partial English
translations for the poem are in The Palestinian Wedding, collected and translated
by A. M. Elmessiri; line drawings by Kamal Boullata (Washington, D.C.: Three
Continents Press, 1982), 55–57; and in Barbara McKean Parmenter, Giving Voice
to Stones: Place and Identity in Palestinian Literature (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1994), 75– 76.
44. The literary critic Hussein Kadhim traces the first use of the term “ liter-
ature of resistance” to the Jordanian writer Isa al-Na’uri, who, he says, used the
term at an October 16–20, 1961, conference in Rome (see Hussain Kadhim, The
Poetics of Anti-Colonialism in the Arabic Qasidah [Leiden: Brill, 2004], viii). Others
credit the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani; see his Adab al-muq1wamah f E Filas-
tEn al-muhtallah, 1948–1966 (Beirut: D1r al-0d1b, 1966).
45. The English-language speeches of Pinhas Rashish, mayor of nearby Petah
Tikva, Eliahu Agasi of the Histadrut, and Abdel Aziz Zubi of the Jewish-Arab
Association are summarized in “Memorial Meeting in Kfar Kassim,” New Out-
look, November–December 1957, 52.
46. Waleed Khleif, “Kafr Qasim,” Al-Ittihad, November 5, 1957 (reprinted in
Majallat al-Adib [Lebanon], October 1959).
47. Mahmud Darwish in Tawfiq Tubi, Kafr Qasim al-majzarah wa-al-’ibrah (Tel
Aviv: Israeli Communist Party Publications, 1996, 164–65 (the fifth poem in the
epic cycle).
48. See Mahmud Darwish, “The Eyes of the Dead at the Door,” in Tubi, Kafr
Qasim al-majzarah wa-al-’ibrah, 165–66 (poem 6 of the malhamah).
49. See also videos of the annual commemorations produced in Kafr Qasim,
available through the municipality of Kafr Qasim.

216 Waleed Khleif and Susan Slyomovics

 50. Samih al-Qasim, “Kafr Qasim,” al-Ittihad, November 1, 1957; another
English translation appears in El-Messiri, The Palestinian Wedding.
51. Natan Alterman, “Tehom ha-meshulash,” Davar, November 7, 1956.
52. Joel Greenberg, “School O‹cial Wants to Mark Israeli Atrocity,” New York
Times, October 7, 1999.
53. On the Israeli community-center movement and the history of its pred-
ecessor government organization, the matnas (the Hebrew acronym for Center
for Culture, Youth, and Sport), see Haim Hazan, A Paradoxical Community (Green-
wich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1990).
54. Thanassis Cambanis, “Candidate Striving to Give Arab-Israelis a Voice,”
Boston Globe, March 23, 2006, A16.

Palestinian Remembrance Days and Plans 217

part iii Overviews and Openings
9 Global Ambition and Local Knowledge

gwendolyn wright

W hen Walter Gropius began a decade-long master plan for

Baghdad University in 1953, the sensuous curves, courtyards,
and mashribiya screens of his buildings projected orientalist fan-
tasies in high-tech concrete (see fig. 9.1).1 During these same years, Josep Lluis
Sert infused the American Embassy in Baghdad (1955–61) with his personal
ideas about tropical conditions and the larger Mediterranean realm.2 A half-
century later, confronting new American eªorts to reconstruct the Middle
East, it seems incumbent to ask why stalwart modern architects would have
chosen to engage this local context in such conspicuous ways. Premonitions
of postmodernism? Surely this label is too narrowly construed in terms of
Western cultural fashions, including the notion of an autonomous architec-
ture culture. These designs, and others like them, instead show the inherent
volatility of modernism—perhaps especially in the tumultuous Middle East.
Ever-present local meanings and practices shift continuously, in part by nego-
tiating the global flow of capital and politics, images, and ideas.3
The geopolitical arena of “Western architecture” has engaged the Mid-
dle East and North Africa since the idea first coalesced under the Romans.
Early-twentieth-century modernism drew from the white cubic forms of these
vernaculars, even as colonialism’s mission civilisatrice claimed to embody
shared principles of social equality and scientific rationality. Connections inten-
sified after World War II, prompted by a fuller understanding of indigenous
architecture, especially its environmental adaptations, but even more so by

221
fig. 9.1. Proposed entry to University of Baghdad Auditorium. Walter Gropius and TAC,
1953–58.

new universals, notably a free-market economy, advanced technologies, and

nuclear families at the micro-level. The Middle East became a prime site to
implement W. W. Rostow’s “takeoª” stage of modernization—in principle,
a process through which all societies had to proceed, although, as with ear-
lier concepts of civilization, the highest level closely resembled the West’s
own dominant values.4 Critics of the late-1960s and the decade of the 1970s
rebelled against these claims, condemning the disruptive inequities of inter-
national development and urban renewal, attacking modern architecture as
an inhumane abstraction that looked just the same all over the world.
In fact, as with Gropius and Sert in Baghdad, modern architects in the Mid-
dle East during the 1950s and 1960s often made reference to local cultures—
if only by simplistic assumptions about the past and the future. These
allusions show the ongoing role of history and locale as inspiration, integra-
tion, and resistance. “Staging the modern has always required the non-
modern,” contends Timothy Mitchell. “The production of modernity involves
the staging of diªerences.”5 Only in modern times can people worry about
the fate of traditions: whether certain practices or places should be abolished,
transformed, or preserved. Of course, the very word “tradition” shifts atten-
tion from complex historical legacies to vague or mythic ideals. Anthropol-
ogists insist that traditions have always been in flux as well as embedded, but
architects prefer their own bifurcated analysis, excoriating “outdated” atti-

222 Gwendolyn Wright

tudes and settings, as if these impediments to progress could be surgically
removed, while extolling “authentic vernaculars” as organic, indeed, time-
less. Such imaginary realms, supposedly uncontaminated by the pastiche and
commercialism of modern life, can only exist in the long-ago or far-away. This
is a tourist’s perspective, what Mitchell has called the world-as-exhibition, and
Aziz al-Azmeh, a celebration of primal innocence.6 Yet architects, then and
now, must confront the paradoxical relationship between tradition and
modernity wherever they design. “Rather than doing away with tradition,”
asserts the geographer Jane Jacobs, “globalization has delivered new condi-
tions for its emergence; installed new mechanisms for its transference; and
brought into being new political imperatives for its performance.”7
Post–World War II architecture in the Middle East reveals distinct patterns,
but no simple formulas. The ambiguity makes it easy to fall back on such
dichotomies as modern vs. traditional, West vs. non-West, or foreign vs. indige-
nous. This essay proposes instead a series of triads—admittedly, another
artifice, but one that is considerably more flexible. I will explore modern archi-
tecture and urbanism in three nations over three decades, roughly the period
from 1945 to 1975—a time span that marks the start of Lebanon’s civil war;
an upsurge of new construction in Saudi Arabia, funded by profits from
OPEC’s oil embargo; and Anwar Sadat’s neoliberal Infitah policy in Egypt.
Three overlapping tendencies in architecture culture were all, to some extent,
modern responses as well. Even as the heroic international style reached its
apogee, some Westerners sought to revitalize formal dogmas by tapping into
the “authenticity” of local cultures; their universal vernacular emerged from
the dense, irregular settlement patterns of Moroccan ksours, Dogon huts, and
Mediterranean villages, prompting architects to cite similar “precedents,” or
“justifications,” for their modern designs.8 Meanwhile, several indigenous
architects espoused a more circumscribed design approach, supposedly able
to sustain cohesive community life, based on traditional Arab-Islamic con-
struction principles (see fig. 9.2), while historic preservation emerged as a pro-
fession with its own universal principles, although strategies varied from one
nation to another. Intellectual frameworks outside the design professions
also played a role. First was the notion of the “colonial situation,” suggesting
how hegemony was exercised—and contested—after independence.9 Second
came the modernization theories of Pax Americana. Third, the rise of inter-
disciplinary area studies in American universities focusing on critical regions
like the Middle East with its vast oil resources and political antagonisms in
the wake of Israel’s formation out of Palestine in 1948.10
The goals of architectural patronage in the region were clear in principle,

Global Ambition and Local Knowledge 223

fig. 9.2. Sketch of the village of New Gourna, Egypt. Hassan Fathy, 1945–48. Courtesy
of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture. Photo by Gary Otte.

if less so in practice: the import and training of professional experts; instal-

lation of modern infrastructure; state provision of social services like edu-
cation and health care; national housing programs; a historic preservation
agenda; and the rise of a profit-driven private sector, both local and transna-
tional. Most architects were ardent modernists, as were their clients, who
employed terms like hadith (new or modern), ‘asri (contemporary or mod-
ern), and madani (civilized or refined).11 The majority of designers hailed from

224 Gwendolyn Wright

the United States, Europe, and occasionally Japan, though many were local,
at least to the region, and often a‹liated with the Arab Bureau of Architects,
Planners, and Technical Consultants in Cairo, a product of Nasser’s pan-
Arab vision. The region’s historical richness and cultural vitality, especially
in the ancient cities, prompted modernists to incorporate references to local
history— or at least historical fantasies—while preservationists and neo-
traditionalists sought, usually in vain, to protect monuments, building prac-
tices, and social life from the force Joseph Schumpter has labeled capitalism’s
“creative destruction.” Most designers had good intentions, whatever their
stylistic preferences. They sincerely hoped to situate modern architecture,
making it less intrusive and more inspiring. Yet the eªects of modern archi-
tecture extend far beyond individual buildings. A much larger, less distinct
picture is critical to evaluating even relative successes and failures.
Modernism and neo-traditionalism coexisted in the Middle East. The cities
of the region did not experience a cultural battle between opposing architec-
tural camps, in part because they were confronting other, more pressing,
soon overwhelming urban problems. There, as elsewhere, urban problems
responded to local, national, and international events. But conditions were
magnified in the chaotic, contentious, and often impoverished nations that
now called themselves the Third World. According to some observers, mod-
ern architectural buildings in the Middle East might look like frightful dis-
tortions, whimsical anomalies, chaotic disasters, or exhilarating opportunities.
As with any modern city, all these perspectives were accurate.

The post–World War II era was simultaneously prosperous and incendiary

in Lebanon. Lebanon had gained formal independence with the end of the
French Mandate in 1943, but American interests quickly assumed a dominant
role there. In 1951, the United States underwrote a pipeline across Lebanon
to transport Saudi and Iraqi crude oil. When insurrection broke out in 1958,
the Marines invaded, ostensibly to prevent a Communist threat, installing for-
mer general Fuad Shihab as president. Multiple strata of history underlay the
bright modern surface of Beirut, the capital city called the “Pearl of the Mid-
dle East”; some provided stable foundations reaching back millennia, but
others proved to be dangerous fault lines. Long-standing antagonisms between
Maronite Christians, Muslims, and Druze produced a highly ineªective, byzan-
tine government apparatus for sharing power. More recent conflicts also fes-
tered, especially those surrounding Israel’s expulsion of Palestinians, hundreds
of thousands of whom ended up in refugee camps on the outskirts of the
city. Pressures mounted as massive amounts of capital investments and rural

Global Ambition and Local Knowledge 225

in-migration transformed the economics of real estate. Beirut’s residential
population tripled between 1952 and 1964, reaching almost 900,000 people.
The influence of France continued to dominate architectural education
and practice. The major figure in architecture was Michel Ecochard, who
had first worked as an archaeologist in Syria and Lebanon under the Man-
date, then sought to assuage Lebanon’s root-bound cultural tensions using
the orthodox modern formulas of CIAM (the Congrès International
d’Architecture Moderne).13 Ecochard’s initial, 1943 master plan for Beirut,
modified and expanded over the next twenty years, adhered to CIAM rules:
extensive clearance and selective preservation in the center (see fig. 9.3); a
modern, “healthy city” (later two) alongside the “ailing city”; and a rational
street-grid linked to high-speed expressways along the coast. Despite repeated
eªorts and formal approval of his 1964 plan, these rational urban analyses
had little eªect on the city’s development.14 Ecochard’s architecture proved
to be more lasting, if isolated, with sensitive adaptations of historical build-
ings for civic purposes, together with several handsome, well-sited modern
schools and hospitals from the 1950s.
Others, too, seemed confident that Euro-American “technical know-how”
could unite and modernize Lebanon. Information and design ambition were
available in abundance. Under the auspices of the U.S. Operations Mission,
Constantinos Doxiadis began gathering extensive data and photographs for
a nationwide housing initiative in the mid-1950s, a project that was abruptly
derailed by the “Crisis of 1958.”15 In consolation, Doxiadis would design a
new Government Center just outside Beirut in 1963, of which only the Min-
istry of Telecommunication was built. Like most architects, whether foreign
or Lebanese, Doxiadis rejected any reference to the “pastiche” of Mandate-
era colonial styles, convinced that functional modernism would guarantee
progress and unity. Some advocated Bauhaus exercises in “type forms” and
“a pure language of lines, shapes, colors, and materials.”16 Bold geometries
characterized government buildings. The chaste cubic volumes of the Union
Nationale (1952) and the Ministry of Justice (1959), by the Lebanese architect
Antoine Tabet, conveyed order and permanence. André Wogenscky, a French-
man who had worked with Le Corbusier in Paris and with ATBAT-Afrique
in Casablanca, designed several public buildings in collaboration with Mau-
rice Hindieh, a young, French-trained Lebanese. Their most important com-
mission, the 1965 Defense Ministry, combines a dramatic sculptural façade
with a rational plan (see fig. 9.4).1 7 International stars were imported, includ-
ing Alvar Aalto and Alfred Roth, who designed a major o‹ce building and
commercial center in 1963.

226 Gwendolyn Wright

fig. 9.3. Photomontage of a proposed urban renewal and preservation project in
central Beirut, Lebanon. Michel Ecochard, 1963. Courtesy of the Aga Khan Trust for
Culture.

Unfortunately, these visions focused on talent and convictions about the

future, rather than engaging the real dilemmas of the time, including clear
evidence of overpopulation, hyperspeculation, sectarian strife, and ensuing
environmental disasters. Development in the city center, headquarters for all
major businesses and the nucleus of exchange between diverse neighbor-
hoods, was more chaotic than dynamic, since profit seemed the only com-
mon value. This critique is not simply a matter of hindsight. Soon after leaving

Global Ambition and Local Knowledge 227

fig. 9.4. Lebanese Defense Ministry, Beirut. André Wogenscky and Maurice Hindieh,
1965. Courtesy of André Wogenscky and Maurice Hindieh.

Beirut’s Technical Bureau (the city’s planning department), which he directed

from 1956 to 1959, the Palestinian Saba George Shiber condemned the cen-
tral business district as the embodiment of “our utter state of laissez faire,
anti-civicism, cupidity, disorder, caprice, and extreme materialism”; he also
lambasted the majority of that area’s architecture as “ loud and jarring, pirated
or plagiarized.”18
Domestic architecture showed a similar tension, seemingly innovative, but
in fact dangerously neglectful of social conditions. The best houses combined
modern Euro-American villas with regional traditions in massing and envi-
ronmental controls. Samir Khairallah and Pierre el-Khoury deftly interpreted
new typologies in light of the region’s topography, climate, and social mores.
Market-rate housing was another story altogether. Small walk-up apartment
buildings were demolished, to be replaced by large high-rises with elevators;
demure balconies inflated into terraces supported by concrete columns, ori-
entated to distant views rather than the street below. Expensive luxury resi-
dences dominated the urban market, creating a precipitous shortage for other
classes. Even with commerce on the ground floor, this new housing helped
speed a shift from collective life in extended-family clans to privacy in nuclear
families—though clans would assert considerable power during the civil
war. More egregiously, nothing was done to alleviate problems in the fast-
growing squatter settlements outside the city.19
The great international hotels helped fuel an image of Beirut as a cosmo-
politan Mediterranean paradise appealing to tourists from the Gulf to Europe

228 Gwendolyn Wright

and the United States. An early and lavish example was Edward Durrell Stone’s
Phoenicia Inter-Continental of 1954.20 Other kinds of businesses soon fol-
lowed, hoping to lure investment in a similar manner. Irving & Jones designed
the Middle East headquarters of the American Life Insurance Company with
colonnades and a rooftop aluminum grill, which they supposedly derived from
Islamic mashribaya screens, ignoring the fact that this “typical” Islamic dec-
oration was rare in the Levant.21 In contrast, Samir Khairallah skillfully incor-
porated traditional references in his commercial and educational buildings.
The American University in Beirut created a course in Regional Architecture
in 1964, the first in the Middle East.22 President Shehab, recognizing the nas-
cent desire for national self-expression, emphasized a personal preference for
pointed arches in a 1963 state commission for a building to promote Lebanese
handicrafts. Taking the cue, Jacques Aractingi and Pierre Neema designed a
building that features structural columns that rise up to an allusion of arches
under the roof slab (see fig. 9.5).23 Even the U.S. Area Handbook of 1968 noted
the tendency to infuse modernism with traditional Arabic architectural
motifs.24 Other non-Western cultures shared these sentiments. Many Lebanese
architects admired Brazil and Morocco for their vivid expressions of cultural
pride and climactic adaptations. In 1962 Oscar Niemeyer was invited to build
the International and Permanent Fair in Tripoli.25
Despite these sentiments, the pace of construction and the lack of regula-

fig. 9.5. Center for Lebanese Handicrafts/Maison de l’Artisan, Beirut. Jacques Aractingi
and Pierre Neema, 1963.

Global Ambition and Local Knowledge 229

tions encouraged widespread demolition.26 A private citizens’ group tried to
raise public awareness, with little success. The Department of Antiquities was
transferred to the Ministry of Tourism, which concentrated on excursions to
the Hellenistic ruins at Baalbek. Only one urban site seemed sacred, Beirut’s
central markets, or souks, as if continuity there could assure harmony and
resolve antagonisms that ranged from glaring social inequalities to angry col-
lective memories. These attitudes resound today with Solidere, the private
development association that oversees reconstruction in Beirut’s central core.
In an eªort to erase the disturbing reminders of violent destruction during
fifteen years of civil war, all new architecture in the area must evoke the regional
modernism of the Mandate era—including Rafael Moneo’s 1996 design for
the new souks.27 Solidere is confident in the unifying power of its design solu-
tion, just as Shihab’s post-1958 government had been in its commitment

Petroleum was key to Saudia Arabia’s modernism—and to the power of its

traditional rulers. When Abdul Aziz al Saud (known as “Ibn Saud” in the West)
declared himself king of a unified nation in 1932, he marked the occasion by
bringing the new nation’s first automobile to his palace in Riyadh. Six years
later, an American company discovered the first major oil supply and created
a joint venture with the king. The U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Navy,
having decided that access to Saudi oil was a national priority during World
War II, backed further explorations and renamed the venture Aramco (the
Arabian American Oil Company).28 Aramco engineers constructed up-to-date
housing, educational, medical, and shopping facilities for some 150,000
employees and their families—gridiron desert enclaves with an eerie resem-
blance to American suburbs.29 Saudi o‹cials took these settlements as a model
for development in the early 1950s. Aramco generously agreed to help, bring-
ing in the Bechtel Corporation to equip the entire country with electricity,
sewage systems, paved roads, bridges, rail links, an airport, and prefabricated
dwellings in new “town-sites” (see fig. 9.6).30 If architecture remained func-
tional and plain, the base had been transformed.
Saudi rulers did mix tradition, luxury, and new technologies in their own
royal complexes. The Emir Saud commissioned two extravagant palaces in
the early 1950s, both entirely in concrete: the Qasr el-Hokm in Riyadh and
another just outside at Nasiriyyah. These qualities continued to define later,
even larger royal complexes when Saud became ruler following his father’s
death in 1953. One, an entirely new palace at Nasiriyyah in 1956, is probably
the world’s first completely air-conditioned city, with more than nineteen
miles of chilled-water pipes serving over 120 buildings.31

230 Gwendolyn Wright

fig. 9.6. Plan for the “town-site” of Dammon, Saudi Arabia, by Aramco engineers, ca.
1950. From Shiber, Recent Arab City Growth.

Meanwhile, two small Saudi towns catapulted to global status. In 1947 King
Abdul Aziz commissioned Egyptian architect Sayed Karim to transform Jed-
dah into the kingdom’s main business and commercial center. Demolition
of the historic coral walls facilitated expansion, and the population grew
almost tenfold, from some 30,000 people in 1947 to over 200,000 by 1960.32
Development in Riyadh was equally spectacular. Abdul Aziz again tore down
the city walls and commissioned a plan from Karim. Preferences for simplic-
ity exerted a pronounced eªect here, since adherence to the region’s strict
Wahabi fundamentalism had buttressed the Saudi clan’s authority since
1803.33 Traditional massing continued, albeit with slightly larger fenestration—
though reinforced concrete, first used in the 1940s, soon became the mate-
rial of choice. When Saud chose Riyadh to replace Mecca as the nation’s
political capital in 1953, Doxiadis was asked to prepare a master plan. After
several years of study, he proposed vigorous interventions in “action areas,”
with cantilevers and covered passages to connect isolated buildings, but made
scant provision for semi-private space, so essential to Islamic urban life, in
new residential areas.34 The UNDP initiated development programs, as yet
unaware of the wealth that Saudi Arabia would accrue with the creation of
OPEC in 1960.35
Minoru Yamasaki’s flamboyant 1961 airport in Dhahran (see fig. 9.7), near
Aramco’s headquarters, anticipated a pivotal shift in taste and power. Crown
Prince Faisal deposed Saud in 1964, and the new monarch emphatically

Global Ambition and Local Knowledge 231

embraced modernization—within certain limits. Education became para-
mount, albeit suªused with traditions as well as the latest technologies. To
inaugurate his reign, Faisal commissioned the St. Louis-based Hellmuth, Obata
& Kassabaum (HOK) to create a vast new campus for King Saud University
(see fig. 9.8); and the Houston-based Caudill, Rowlett & Scott (CRS), one for
the University for Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran, close to Aramco’s
headquarters. Both campuses featured “Islamic” ornament, colonnaded
arcades, and pointed arches. In marked contrast, Ahmed Farid Moustapha,
an MIT-trained Egyptian, allowed no such historicist references for Riyadh
University and the King Faisal University in Damman.
Faisal’s modernization worked best in collective improvements. Mas-
sive infrastructure projects transformed Riyadh’s appearance and its way of
life.36 WAISIA, a complex consisting of a water treatment plant and pumping
stations designed by McDonald and Yakeley, encompassed an entire exper-
imental village; water towers by the Swedish engineer Sune Lindstroem
raised necessity to the status of art. Paolo Ghera’s Central Market used a
prefabricated system of vaulted concrete forms, while the simplicity of
Trevor Dannat’s conference center and the boldness of Kenzo Tange’s King
Faisal Foundation building assert confidence in international research and
philanthropy.
Even sacred sites underwent radical alterations. The Saudi royal family
proudly oversees Mecca and Medina, pilgrimage destinations for Muslims
from around the world. Abdul Aziz had commissioned a new plan for Mecca
from Sayed Karim in 1952, but almost a million pilgrims were arriving for the
hajj by the mid-1960s, creating an urgent need for updating. Faisal, invested
as King and Imam, ordered Mecca’s Great Mosque and Medina’s Mosque of
the Prophet to be rebuilt and expanded; they now featured minarets, arcades,
and elaborate ornamentation, none of which were familiar idioms in the
peninsula. He then hired a British firm, Robert Matthew Johnson Marshall
and Partners (RMJM) to prepare a new plan. RMJM insisted on gearing every-
thing to the automobile, prompting the government to spend enormous sums
on highways, tunnels through the mountains, and multistory parking facili-
ties. While these interventions ran counter to the historic simplicity of the
hajj, the tensile structure of pilgrim accommodations (Kenzo Tange, Frei Otto,
and Rolf Gutbrod, 1964–67) and the later Hajj Terminal (Fazlur R. Khan for
SOM, 1978–82) did embrace the historical forms and impermanent nature
of this religious experience.37
Saudi resources expanded exponentially with OPEC’s oil embargo in 1973.
Gaudy architecture flourished outside the Old Towns in Jeddah and Riyadh,

232 Gwendolyn Wright

fig. 9.7. Airport for Dharan. Minoru Yamasaki, 1961. Courtesy of Minoru Yamasaki,
New York.

fig. 9.8. King Saud University near Riyadh, corridor. HOK, 1964–82. Courtesy
of Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum, St. Louis.
as courtyard houses gave way to detached suburban villas and opulent mul-
tistory residential buildings. (A few enthusiasts justified the shift by claiming
that apartment towers harked back to Saudi precedents.38) If traditional sen-
timents remained strong, the results were now highly self-conscious and often
quite expensive. Fathy designed a few elegantly simple houses, but, for the
most part, façades as well as interiors were bedecked with imitations of hand-
crafted Islamic detailing—now ridiculed as “cut-and-paste” or “Gulf clip-on”
décor, as if similar phenomena did not appear elsewhere.39 Architects, clients,
and policymakers must always consider many factors, including cost; façades
and ornament are rarely a simple matter of choosing either modernism or
neo-traditionalism. Sometimes Western models were tried and discarded with
good reason, as when Jeddah demolished the mammoth public-housing tow-
ers (likened to Pruitt-Igoe) built under the 1973 Rush Housing Program. Yet
no one abided by the Muslim obligation for charity by improving the grim,
isolated camps for foreign workers—who soon comprised almost one of every
three people making Saudi Arabia home.40
When Sheik Mohammed Said Farsi, trained as an architect, became mayor
of Jeddah in 1975, he commissioned a new plan from RMJM. Rejecting the
aggressive modernization of Mecca as a model for Jeddah, both the client
and the architect now adopted a policy of maximum conservation for the
historic core and reoriented the city toward the Corniche, a magnificent curv-
ing road along the seashore, which soon became a prime setting for new archi-
tecture, both modern and neo-traditional.41 The most notable examples are
Abdelwahed El-Wakil’s exquisite mosques, elegant houses, and a headquar-
ters for Datsun. El-Wakil embraced historic building technologies and typolo-
gies, but he did so with a deep understanding of historical processes, seeking
to “reinterpret [the constants] within the new context.”42 O‹cial and corpo-
rate support certainly helped. Some residents complained that El-Wakil’s
Datsun complex drew upon the distinctive simple façades of Riyadh, rather
than the more ornamented surfaces of Jeddah, but new regulations under
Mayor Farsi adopted this “creolized” typology as a new vernacular.
Riyadh, the capital, became the largest building site in the world in the
mid-1970s, issuing an average of seventy permits each day.43 The results var-
ied greatly, to be sure, in quality as in the range of formal idioms. The Saudi
royal family now adopted a stylistic prescription consistent with its commit-
ment to “Islamic solidarity,” conservative social mores, and authoritarian
government, even as it promoted advances in technology and economic devel-
opment. Architectural preferences thus went far deeper than emulating the
fashion for postmodernism in Western countries. These various, seemingly

234 Gwendolyn Wright

fig. 9.9. Government o‹ces, Qasr el-Hokm District, Riyadh. Franco Albini/Studio de
Architettura, 1974–78.
contradictory tendencies came together most clearly when Franco Albini and
his Studio de Architettura won the 1974 competition for new government
o‹ces in Riyadh’s Qasr el-Hokm (see fig. 9.9).44 History itself could be sac-
rificed, so long as certain traditions were protected. Although the site had
been the nucleus of Saudi regional government for over a century, most of
the older structures were now demolished— except for Masmak Castle, a
fortress of sun-dried mud where Abdul Aziz had staged his coup against the
Ottomans in 1902, which was restored and preserved as a national monu-
ment.45 Genuinely committed to local typologies, Albini incorporated the
massive crenellated walls of the Najdi vernacular into the design. But Albini
and his staª also presumed to draw from referents throughout the Arab-
Islamic world, as if these coalesced into a fixed set of criteria and forms—
or, in the caustic words of one Italian critic, “a statistical mean.”46
American designers were equally complicit, using architecture to entrench
the authority of multinational businesses and Saudi rulers. A deep respect
for history as well as modern technology permeates the work of SOM’s
Bagladeshi-born engineer Fazlur R. Khan (1929–1982), who designed the Hajj
Terminal and other innovative engagements with Saudi Arabian culture and
climate.47 In contrast, SOM’s in-house research on urban precedents reveals
an orientalist attitude knowledgeable about the past, at least superficially, yet
disdainful of the present. The firm’s 1978 pamphlet, Urban Design Middle East:
A Primer for Development, echoes colonial-era prejudices, declaring without
qualification that no significant advances in Arab design had occurred for over
two-and-a-half centuries.48 Like Albini, the authors drew freely from the entire
Islamic world, including Istfahan, Seville, and Mughal India, all far from the
Persian Gulf. Such references to “the Islamic city” hark back to French and
British historians of the 1920s, who had used this artificial typology to legit-
imate colonial control over a vast region.49 That unfortunate “tradition” rever-
berates in the claim that this rather cursory analysis of “ logical precursors”
would generate “a significant new Islamic urban tradition”—comprised of
“organic forms,” geometric ornament, a “desert vernacular,” and the conti-
nuity of a conservative, hierarchical society—under the benevolent auspices
of the firm and its powerful clients.50

Egypt had incorporated modern reforms ever since the Ottoman pasha
Mehmet Ali transformed much of Cairo in the early nineteenth century,
installing civic institutions and residential districts that laid the foundations
for an indigenous middle class.51 Yet if modernity was not alien, neither
was it benign. After Britain formalized its imperial claim in 1882, the city’s

236 Gwendolyn Wright

population grew precariously larger, more segregated, and more unequal.
Wealthy Egyptians and Europeans lived in elegant luxury, often alongside one
another in fashionable raaqi (upper-class) neighborhoods like Garden City,
Heliopolis, and Zamalek, while the vast majority of Cairenes made do in the
crowded dwellings and vivacious street life of sha’bi districts, which saw vir-
tually no urban improvements.52
Conditions in Cairo certainly looked dire after World War II, while daily
life in villages along the Nile remained relatively static. One might assume
that neo-vernacular architecture would have flourished, given the interna-
tional fame of Hassan Fathy’s new village of Gourna (1945–48), near Luxor
(see fig. 9.2). Yet Fathy’s Architecture for the Poor, published in 1973, was writ-
ten in English; an Arabic translation did not appear until the 1980s.53 New
Gourna itself was considered a failure in Egypt, at least as an o‹cial eªort
to remove the villagers from Old Gourna, so as to destroy their lucrative but
illegal trade in tomb-robbing and demolish what Fathy considered their “unciv-
ilized” self-built dwellings.54 Nationalist sentiments were strong, and Egyp-
tians were justly proud of their history. Sayyid Karim’s magazine Al-’Imara
(Architecture) initiated a call for “national identity in built form” in 1945, con-
tinuing these eªorts until 1959. But few Egyptians of the Nasser era showed
much interest in neo-Pharaonic, neo-Islamic, or other purportedly indigenous
themes. This was considered baladi, a key word that means “traditional, local,
and homely,” in contrast with modern, international and cosmopolitan.55
More urgent national concerns took precedence over architectural idioms.
Egypt had become independent in 1945, and the populace chafed at ongoing
British ownership of the Suez Canal Zone. Tensions erupted in 1952 when
crowds stormed the invisible barrier between Cairo’s “two cities,” setting fire
to foreign hotels, clubs, shops, and movie palaces. Britain was forced to relin-
quish the Canal (but continued to operate it). King Farouk abdicated and the
Revolution Command Council declared a Republic. Egypt’s new leader,
Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, espoused a broad vision: socialism at home,
pan-Arab nationalism in the region, anti-colonialism throughout the Third
World. This made him a hero for the multitudes, a Soviet ally, and a perceived
threat to Western leaders.
Unfortunately, Cairo’s situation worsened drastically after the 1952 revo-
lution. Even the basic infrastructure of water and sewerage systems began
to fail—that is, in the words of one commentator, “to fail even more seri-
ously than had been the case hitherto.”56 The population exploded, from 2.4
million in 1950, to 5.7 million in 1980, by which time Cairo had become one
of the world’s most dense cities, in terms of population.57 Assuming the role

Global Ambition and Local Knowledge 237

fig. 9.10. Hall of the Arab League Headquarters, Cairo, Egypt. Mahmoud Riad,
1958–60. From Cairo: A Life Story of 1000 Years.

fig. 9.11. Nile Hilton, Cairo. Welton Becket, 1953–59.

fig. 9.12. Abdul Nasser’s Urgent Housing Project at Helwan, Greater Cairo, 1965–55.
From Shiber, Recent Arab City Growth.

of president in 1956, Nasser nationalized the Canal and ordered a municipal

master plan to convert Cairo’s recent development into a modern city.58 Thor-
oughfares were cut through the maze of narrow alleys, but the wide streets
soon became congested, dirty, and unbearably hot. Industrial subcenters were
built on the periphery, anticipating the nationalization of the entire indus-
trial sector in 1957. The government sponsored an international seminar on
“The New Metropolis in the Arab World” in 1960. Funds were scarce, how-
ever, and Nasser favored rural land reform, industrialization, and military
spending— especially after the debacle of the 1967 war with Israel.
Egyptian architecture of the 1950s and 1960s represents a truly interna-
tional modernism, that is, it is a contentious amalgam of Communist, capi-
talist, and Third World technologies and aesthetics. Launched in 1952, the
Mugamma, “a huge building in Stalin-Allée concrete,” built to house the vast
state bureaucracy, was the most significant new structure of the era, at least
in its political and visual impact.59 As Nasser played the major Cold War pow-
ers against each other for funds, Egyptian architects garnered most of the
commissions. The lavish lotus-flower filigree of Naoum Shebib’s Cairo
Tower (Al Borg, 1956–61) flaunted the extravagant use of a CIA bribe. Sev-
eral new skyscrapers faced the renamed Midan Tahrir (Liberation Square),
most notably Galal Moemem’s Radio and Television Center. Eager to show

Global Ambition and Local Knowledge 239

their love of culture, the Soviets underwrote the National Theatre and City
of the Arts. The most elegant structure is the most traditional. Mahmoud
Riad’s headquarters for the Arab League (see fig. 9.10), built in 1958–60, evoked
the city’s remarkable Islamic heritage with its simple massing and eloquent
mosaic ornament. The Arab League stood on the former grounds of the
British barracks, across the river from Welton Becket’s opulent Nile Hilton
(1953–59) (see fig. 9.11). The Hilton revealed Pharaonic luxury rather than
regional sensibilities; all guests enjoyed a panoramic view of the Great Pyr-
amids, while the hotel turned a blank wall on the crowded medieval city.60
Cairo’s acute housing shortage led to government interventions as early
as 1946, when the English-trained engineer Ali al-Maligi Masa’ud designed 6,000
standardized units for a “Workers’ City” in Imb1bah.61 The first 1,100 units,
completed just before the 1952 revolution, became the model for Nasser’s
Urgent Housing (Masaakin el-Qadima) program of public housing during the
1960s. Soviet influence meant that the blocks were intentionally large in scale,
standardized, and austere (see fig. 9.12). The massaquin, as they are called (the
best translation would be “the projects,” implying spartan structures and poli-
cies), proved to be prohibitively expensive, poorly located in terms of employ-
ment, and completely inadequate to the need, given the scale of in-migration
from the countryside.62 A diªerent word, ahali, meaning “people,” refers to
privately built apartment buildings. Nasser also advocated de-concentration,
with the first and largest of Cairo’s new towns, Nasr City (Madinet Nasr, or
“Victory City”) providing uniform high-rises for state technocrats.63
Following Nasser’s death in 1970, his protégé, Anwar Sadat, served as pres-
ident until his assassination in 1980. Sadat threw out the Soviets and launched
a disastrous attack on Israel in 1973. Then, seeking to salvage the nation’s
economy and reputation, he embarked on the Infitah (“Open-Door” policy)
in 1974, vowing to modernize the city by promoting foreign investment. Once
committed to modernism, Egypt now turned to Islamicist and neo-Pharaonic
architectural motifs, especially in the center of Cairo and at resort towns, not
for their vernacular familiarity and environmental benefits, but for populist
allure and tourist appeal. Beholden to the West, especially the United States,
Sadat’s regime accentuated the most wasteful, unequal, and ostentatious
aspects of 1970s modernity, including an infatuation with postmodern design.
(Saad Ibrahim contends that Sadat’s urban models were surely Houston and
Los Angeles.64) Housing programs conspicuously favored the upper-middle
class, even though almost half the population lived below the poverty level.
New towns were often organized by profession, as in Madinat al-Awqaf (“The
Engineers’ City”), designed by Mahmoud Riad. Sadat’s masaakin, or public-

240 Gwendolyn Wright

fig. 9.13. Sketch of Mosque-Madrasa of Amir Khayrbak, Cairo, ca. 1977, by Jim
Antoniou, Director of the Medieval Cairo project.

housing, policies espoused “a scientific solution”: relocating the poor from

central areas like Bulaq to distant sites, invisible to tourists, so that property
values would soar in the “new heart of Cairo” with luxury housing, hotels,
o‹ces, and “centers of culture.”65 In fact, however, residential construction
consisted principally of informal self-built shanties—an estimated 87 percent
of the annual total by 1985.66
The historic core of Medieval Cairo (also called Old Cairo) remained rela-

Global Ambition and Local Knowledge 241

tively untouched until the end of Sadat’s regime. Originally the town of Fus-
tat, founded in 641 a.d., this area has one of the finest and largest concentra-
tions of Islamic architectural history in the world. Nearly 4 square kilometers
in size, its present occupants were mostly rural migrants to the city, at least
half of them impoverished. Nasser’s commitment to centralized authority had
led him to nationalize all preservation eªorts, even though the state Antiqui-
ties Department had neither the budget nor the expertise to maintain, much
less restore, the more than six hundred listed monuments.67 Recognizing the
toll of neglect, Sadat’s Antiquities Department asked European and American
archaeological institutes to adopt individual buildings or neighborhoods.68
UNESCO then sponsored a master plan for Medieval Cairo in 1980, the year
of Sadat’s assassination. Research drew on scientific data, maps, and photo-
graphic documentation; the staª identified six clusters of monuments, each
viewed as a “heritage corridor” that would draw foreign visitors.69 Publicity
featured charming sketches of street life around the monuments (see fig. 9.13),
prepared by the project’s director, the American architect Jim Antoniou.
Antoniou’s 1981 report suggests a concluding point for my essay. Histor-
ical continuity, he wrote, provides late-twentieth-century Cairo with “a means
of avoiding cultural disruptions, preserving cultural identity, and establish-
ing an organic link between the past, the present and the future.”70 These
words reveal a change in architectural parameters. The altered framework
split architecture into two separate, relatively autonomous camps, erasing
much of the earlier cross-fertilization. Historically-minded design now
looked myopically to the past, less concerned with creative play, environ-
mentalism, or social life than with exacting archaeological criteria leavened
by high-minded rhetoric. Modern architecture looked to the present and the
developer’s bottom line, which allowed for the latest fashions, but for little
depth or vision. This generation of Egyptian architects, whatever their bent
and their origins, whether indigenous or foreign, was no longer challenged
by the complexities of history—including modernism’s own founding beliefs
in social progress.
A brief overview of post–World War II modern architecture in the Mid-
dle East raises some intriguing questions. How best to characterize the pat-
terns as three seemingly consistent terms—modernism, history, and
locale—were played out on diªerent stages? What are the implications
today, wherever one might be? Contemporary scholars, architects, and social
activists around the world are raising similar issues.71 They agree that local
knowledge remains critical in an age of global economics and cultural fash-
ions. There is no essence or truth here, as some would claim, but there are

242 Gwendolyn Wright

myriad particularities, distinctive places, and narratives. Each locale may be
circumscribed, perhaps insular, but even parochial viewpoints suggest alter-
native ways to view the world—and ourselves.72 Indeed, we modernists have
our own types of provincialism.73 Not only do we believe that the rest of the
world should abide by our values, whether in political philosophy, popular
culture, medicine, or architecture; we tend to explain the inevitable dissonance
as other people’s ignorance or as minor deviations from a norm.
These three nations show that modern architecture assumed many forms
and generated diverse eªects in a single region, indeed, in each country or
city. Talent was only one of many variables. Good intentions confronted
tenuous circumstances. Modernism’s benefits and burdens co-existed in an
unstable calculus: multinational investment, foreign interventions, cosmopol-
itan pleasures, and dangerous disparities in Lebanon; rapid wealth, techno-
logical development, and ultraconservative authoritarian leadership in
Saudi Arabia; state socialism, ambitious social programs, and slow-moving
bureaucracies in Egypt. New buildings responded to these circumstances—
but always with exceptions to the rule. They could be visually disturbing,
tedious, or inspiring; socially oppressive as well as enlightened; culturally exhil-
arating or debilitating—and often several conflicting qualities simultaneously.
References to regional vernaculars or historical traditions in architecture
likewise showed common tonalities and unique eªects. Seen in a positive light,
these influences modulated modernist orthodoxy, generating distinctive
appearances and richer meanings, even if these qualities were not always
legible outside the context. Viewed from another perspective, however, they
could be reactionary and divisive. Injurious traditions had repercussions that
aªected architecture, at least indirectly: an unregulated laissez-faire economy,
hedonistic pleasures, and sectarian rivalries in Lebanon; autocratic leadership,
conspicuous displays of wealth, and deeply conservative social mores in Saudi
Arabia; bureaucratic inaction, deep cultural pride, and entrenched poverty
in Egypt. Seeking to preserve a supposed purity or superiority in race, reli-
gion, nationhood, or cultural preferences, people often turn against other
groups and alternative points of view. The critique can be extended to the
traditions or habitudes of peripatetic architects and other modern citizens of
the world who never question their ability to capture the nature of a place,
even a large city, and what it needs, often in a fleeting visit.
Rather than relying on comparisons to explain this situation, I suggest a
more flexible model of ongoing exchange. This shifts the focus from individ-
uals or groups to more open-ended processes. The flow of ideas and images
is multidirectional, not linear, with unpredictable results, as exchanges fol-

Global Ambition and Local Knowledge 243

low o‹cial and informal routes. This was certainly the case as modern archi-
tecture evolved in the Middle East. Historians usually trace the paths of elite
professionals who emanated from Europe and the United States. We might
consider the role of local or regional traditions, especially those with indis-
putable provenance; but we tend to neglect more popular currents, as well
as the modern architectural trends of Morocco, Greece, Brazil, and other
Third World nations, especially if they were modified or “corrupted” en route.
These other processes are di‹cult to track, and even more so to classify: the
impetus could be commercial or spiritual, creative or coercive; the results,
awkward or inspired, mimetic or original. Yet this perspective helps reframe
how we might think about modern architecture. Inherently global in formal
and economic terms, it must have some flexibility, yet always remain partic-
ular to local contexts of history, geography, culture, and power.

notes

1. The original project for University City in Baghdad included 273 buildings
designed by Gropius with The Architects Collaborative (TAC) and the Iraqi archi-
tect Hisham Munir. Political unrest limited the project to only a few dozen build-
ings, constructed mostly in the late 1960s. For commentary, see Hasan-Uddin
Khan, ed., The Middle East, vol. 5 of World Architecture, 1900–200, ed. Kenneth Framp-
ton (Vienna and New York: Springer, 2000), 5: 92–95; “Planning the University of
Baghdad,” Architectural Record 129 (February 1961): 107–22.
2. Samuel Isenstadt, “ ‘Faith in a Better Future,’ ” Journal of Architectural Edu-
cation 50 (February 1997): 172– 78; Bastlund, Josep Luis Sert, Architecture, City Plan-
ning, Urban Design (Barcelona: Gustave Gili, 1968), 98–109.
3. I have drawn principally on Alfred E. Eckes and Thomas W. Zeiler, Global-
ization and the American Century (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press,
2003); John R. Short, Global Dimensions (London: Reaktion, 2002); Kris Olds,
Globalization and Urban Change (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2001); Michael Peter Smith, Transnational Urbanism (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell,
2001); Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore, Md.: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1997); and Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of
Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).
4. See Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free
Press, 1958); Walt Whitman Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth (Cambridge,
U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1960); as well as more recent indictments, such

244 Gwendolyn Wright

as Timothy Mitchell, “The Object of Development,” in Power of Development, ed.
Jonathan Crush (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 127–57. For background
on the United States and the Middle East, see Mahmoud Mandami, Good Mus-
lim, Bad Muslim (New York: Pantheon, 2004); Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Roger Owen, State, Power and Pol-
itics in the Making of the Modern Middle East (New York and London: Routledge,
2000); Irene L. Gendzier, Notes from the Minefield (New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 1997); and David W. Lesch, ed., The Middle East and the United States
(Boulder, Col.: Westview, 1999).
5. Timothy Mitchell, “The Stage of Modernity,” in his Questions of Modernity
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 24, 26. Jean-Paul Bourdier,
a scholar of “traditional” architecture in sub-Saharan Africa, acknowledges that
“tradition identified as the past is a modernist idea” (see Bourdier, “Reading Tra-
dition,” in Dwellings, Settlements and Tradition, ed. Jean-Paul Bourdier and Nezar
AlSayyad [Lanham, Md.: University of America Press, 1989], 38; and Nicholas K. Dirks,
“History as a Sign of the Modern,” Public Culture 2 [Spring 1990]): 25– 32.
6. Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1988); and Aziz al-Azmeh, Islams and Modernities (London: Verso, 1993).
I am, of course, also indebted to the work of Edward Said, especially Oriental-
ism, and his ideas about Orientalists’ “unshakable abstract maxims [about] a gen-
eral object, the whole Orient,” and the “myth of arrested development.”
7. Jane Jacobs, “Tradition Is (Not) Modern,” in The End of Tradition? ed. Nezar
AlSayyad (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 32.
8. See Alison Smithson, ed., Team 10 Meeting, 1953–1984 (New York, 1991); Sarah
Williams Goldhagen and Réjean Legault, eds., Anxious Modernisms (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press for the Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2000), especially the
essay in that volume by Felicity Scott, “Bernard Rudofsky: Allegories of Nomadism
and Dwelling,”215– 38; and Gwendolyn Wright, ed., The History of History in Amer-
ican Schools of Architecture (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 39–46.
Three books on “non-pedigreed” vernacular design became highly successful in
the United States: Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture without Architects (New York:
Museum of Modern Art/Doubleday, 1964); Amos Rapoport, House Form and Cul-
ture (Englewood Cliªs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969); and Paul Oliver, Shelter and Soci-
ety (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969). Anthony D. King juxtaposes the lyrical
descriptions of dwellings in books like Rudofsky’s with the denigrating appraisals
of colonial and post-colonial o‹cials who routinely demolished indigenous hous-
ing, rural as well as urban, in the name of modern standards (see King, Urbanism,
Colonialism, and the World Economy [New York and London: Routledge, 1990], 53).

Global Ambition and Local Knowledge 245

 9. See Georges Balandier, “La situation colonial” (1955), reprinted as “The
Colonial Situation: A Theoretical Approach,” in Social Change: the Colonial Situa-
tion, ed. Immanuel Wallerstein (New York: Wiley, 1966), 34–61.
10. See Wendell C. Bennett, Area Studies in American Universities (New York:
Social Science Research Council, 1951); Carl Leiden, ed., The Conflict of Tradition-
alism and Modernism in the Muslim Middle East (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1966); and Manfred Halpern, The Politics of Social Change in the Middle East and
North Africa (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963). For later critiques, see
Neil Waters, ed., Beyond the Area Studies War (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of
New England, 2000); and Timothy Mitchell, “The Middle East in the Past and
Future of Social Science,” in The Politics of Knowledge, ed. David Szanton (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 2004), 74–118.
11. Farha Ghannam, Remaking the Modern (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2002), 2.
12. Samir Khalaf and Per Kongstad, “Urbanization and Urbanism in Beirut,” in
From Medina to Metropolis, ed. L. Carl Brown (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1973), 117,
130. These figures do not include the equally stunning growth in Beirut’s suburbs.
13. Marlène Ghorayeb, “The Work and Influence of Michel Ecochard in
Lebanon,” in Projecting Beirut, ed. Peter C. Rowe and Hasim Sarkis (Munich and
New York: Prestel, 1998), 106 –21; Ghorayeb, “Au croisement des cultures
urbaines,” Maghreb Machrek, no. 143 ( Jan.-March, 1994): 162–89; and Ghorayeb,
“Homage à Michel Ecochard,” special issue of Revue des Études Islamiques 53 (1985).
14. Friedrich Ragette, “Reconstruction,” in The Middle East City, ed. Abdul-
aziz Y. Saqqaf (New York: Paragon House, 1987), 267. Assem Salam speaks of the
“coe‹cient of exploitation” driving development in “The Role of Government
in Shaping the Built Environment,”(in Rowe and Sarkis, Projecting Beirut, 126).
See also Jade Tabet, Beyrouth (Paris: Institut Français d’Architecture, 2001); May
Davie, Beyrouth (Beirut: CERMOC [Centre d’Études et de Recherches sur le
Moyen-Orient Contemporain], 2001); Jean-Luc Arnaud, ed., Beyrouth, Grand-
Beyrouth (Beirut: CERMOC, 1997); Aida Boudjikanian, “Beyrouth 1920–1991,” in
Le Liban aujourd’hui, ed. Fadia Kiwan (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 1993); Pierre el-Koury,
Pierre el-Khory, Architecture, 1959–1999 (Paris, 2000); Jean-Pierre Gaudin, “L’Urba-
nisme au Levant et le mandat français,” in Architectures françaises outre-mer, ed.
Maurice Culot and Jean-Marie Thiveaud (Liège: Mardiga, 1992), 177–205; Udo
Kultermann, Contemporary Architecture in the Arab States (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1999), 107–14; Samir Khalef and Philip S. Khoury, eds., Recovering Beirut (New York
and Leiden: Brill, 1993); Gebran M. Yacoub, Architectures au Liban, 2 vols. (Beirut:
Samir Abdo, 1993); Friedrich Ragette, ed., Beirut of Tomorrow (Beirut: American
University of Beirut, 1983); Assem Salaam, “City Planning in Beirut and Its Out-

246 Gwendolyn Wright

skirts”; Raymond S. Ghosen, “Beirut Architecture” in Beirut: Crossroads of Cul-
tures (Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1970), 167–202; and Soraya Antonius, Architec-
ture in Lebanon (Beirut: Khayats, 1965).
15. See Hashim Sarkis, Circa 1950 (Beirut: Editions Dar en-Nahar, 2003).
16. The Polish architect Karl Chayer and the Palestinian architect Georges
Rayes were among those who made this argument (see Tabet, “From Colonial
Style to Regional Revivalism,” in Rowe and Sarkis, Projecting Beirut, 90–91).
17. John Hadidian, “A French Architect in Lebanon,” Architecture Plus 1 (May
1973): 24– 31.
18. Saba George Shiber, “Remarks about Urban Aesthetics and Architecture
in the Arab World,” in Recent Arab City Growth (Kuwait: Kuwait Government Print-
ing Press, 1969), 213.
19. Eric N. Peterson, “Housing and Reconstruction,” in Ragette, Beirut of
Tomorrow, 46; Helmut Ruppert, Beyrouth (Beirut: Les Cahiers du Cermoc, no. 21,
1999), 30; Friedrich Ragette, Architecture in Lebanon (Beirut: American University
of Beirut, 1974), 190; Harry H. Smith et al., Area Handbook for Lebanon (Washing-
ton, D.C.: Government Printing O‹ce, 1968), 77–83; and Shiber, Recent Arab City
Growth, 179, 737. Robert Saliba’s Beirut, 1920–1940 (Beirut: Order of Engineers
and Architects, 1998) provides essential background.
20. Antoine Tabet built the St. Georges Hotel in 1932; Karol Schayer, the Carl-
ton, in 1957; André Wogenscky and Maurice Hindieh, the Holiday Inn, in 1971
(see Joseph Fitchett, “From Khans to Khiltons,” Aramco World Magazine 24 [Nov.–
Dec. 1973]: 16–29).
21. Antonious, Architecture in Lebanon, 8.
22. Friedrich Ragette, “A Post-modern Approach to Reconstruction,” in
Ragette, Beirut of Tomorrow, 82.
23. Ragette, “Building on Tradition, 2,” Aramco World Magazine 22
( July–August 1971): 7–8; and Ragette, “Maison de l’Artisan,” in Khan and Framp-
ton, World Architecture, vol. 5, The Middle East 5: 114–15.
24. Smith et al., Area Handbook for Lebanon, 119.
25. The fairgrounds remain only partially completed, another victim of civil
war (see Oscar Niemeyer, “Feira Internacional e Permanente do Líbano en
Trípoli,” Modulo [1962], cited in Farès el-Dahdah, “On Solidère’s Motto,” in Rowe
and Sarkis, Projecting Beirut, 73– 77).
26. See Hana Abu Khadra, “A Pictorial Essay of the Reconstruction Process,”
in Saqqaf, The Middle East City, 279–80; and Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Soci-
ety, 169.
27. See Rafael Moneo, “The Souks of Beirut,” in Rowe and Sarkis, Project-
ing Beirut, 263– 73; Robert Salilba, Beirut City Center Recovery (Beirut, 2004); Angus

Global Ambition and Local Knowledge 247

Garvin and Ramez Maluf, Beirut Reborn (London: Academy Editions, 1996);
and Saree Makdisi, “Laying Claim to Beirut,” Critical Inquiry 23 (Spring 1997):
661– 705.
28. The British controlled oil exploration throughout the Arabian peninsula
in the 1920s, but had no success. Standard Oil was granted a concession in 1933
and discovered oil near Dammon in 1938. The renamed Aramco established a
50/50 distribution system with the Saudis in 1948; the corporation was also allowed
to subtract its profit-share to the Saudis from its U.S. corporate income taxes (see
Eckes and Zeiler, Globalization and the American Century, 140–43, 186–93; Gendzier,
Notes from the Minefield, 38–41; Roy Lebkicher, George Rentz, and Max Steineke,
Aramco Handbook [Dammen: Aramco, 1960]; Fouad Al-Farsy, Saudi Arabia [Lon-
don: Stacey International, 1978]; Al-Farsy, Modernity and Tradition [London and
New York: Kegan Paul International, 1990]; and Norman C. Walpole et al., Area
Handbook for Saudi Arabia [Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1971]).
29. See Anthony Guise, Riyadh (London and New York: Stacey International,
1988), 16; Riyadh Album (London: Stacey International, 1983), 12–13; and Jon Parssi-
nen and Kaizer Talib, “The Development of Dhahran (Saudi Camp) as a Com-
munity,” in The Arab City, ed. Ismaïl Serageldin and Samir El-Sadek (Medina, Saudi
Arabia: Arab Urban Development Institute, 1982), 177–83.
30. Eckes and Zeiler, Globalization and the American Century, 142; George A.
Lipsky, Saudi Arabia (New Haven: Human Relations Area Files Press, 1959), 290–91;
Shiber, Recent Arab City Growth, 191, 100; Saleh A. Al-Hathloul, “Tradition, Con-
tinuity, and Change in the Physical Environment,” Ph.D. diss., MIT, 1981, 144–54;
and Michael E. Bonine, “Cities of Oil and Migrants,” Proceedings of the Interna-
tional Conference on Urbanism in Islam (ICUIT) 2: 340–55 (Tokyo: Middle Eastern
Culture Center, 1989).
31. “Cooling for 13,000 Stores, the Alamo, and a Harem,” Architectural Forum
114 (April 1961): 134. Frei Otto and Rolf Gutbrod built a royal residence and o‹ces
in Riyadh (1978) and then the magnificent limestone-based and tensile-roofed
Towaiq Palace outside the city (1983). Abdelwahed El-Wakil espoused traditional
forms in Jeddah’s Al-Sulaiman Palace (1981), while Kenzo Tange designed a strik-
ing modern palace on the outskirts (1982).
32. Al-Farsy, Saudi Arabia, 129– 31.
33. See Sherban Cantacuzino, “Conference Centre and Hotel, Riyadh, Saudi
Arabia,” Architectural Review 157 (March 1975): 213–14; Guise, Riyadh, 9–14; and
Facey, Dir’iyya and the First Saudi State, 33–47. Abdul Aziz instituted a revival in
1912, the Ikhwan, or “Brotherhood” movement, which was even more spartan
than Wahabism.
34. See Constantinos Doxiadis, Riyadh Existing Conditions (1968), Riyadh Mas-

248 Gwendolyn Wright

ter Plan (1971), and Riyadh Action Master Plan Technical Reports (1979), all cited in
Al-Hathloul, “Tradition, Continuity, and Change in the Physical Environment,”
154–89; see also Francesco Tentori, “From Architecture of Petrodollars to Archi-
tecture for New Man,” Lotus 18 (1978): 109, 114. The master plan was submitted
in 1971 and approved two years later.
35. Al-Farsy, Saudi Arabia, 129– 31.
36. See William A. Beling, ed., King Faisal and the Modernisation of Saudi Ara-
bia (Boulder, Col.: Westview, 1980).
37. See Stefano Bianca, Urban Form in the Arab World, Past and Present (Lon-
don: Thames & Hudson, 2000), 219 –47; Bianca, “Designing Compatibility
between New Projects and the Local Urban Tradition,” in Continuity and
Change, ed. Margaret Bentley Ŝevienko (Cambridge, Mass.: Aga Khan Program
for Islamic Architecture at Harvard and MIT, 1984), 21–28; and Walpole et al.,
Area Handbook for Saudi Arabia.
38. See Geza Feherari, “Towers in Islamic Architecture,” Arts and the Islamic
World 4 (Autumn-Winter 1986): 29– 32.
39. For commentary, see Khaled Asfour, “Cultural Crisis,” Architectural Review,
no. 203 (special issue on the Middle East, March 1998): 52–60; Suha Özkan,
“Regionalism within Modernism,” in Regionalism in Architecture, vol. 1, ed. Robert
Powel (Singapore: Aga Khan Award for Architecture and Concept Media, 1985),
8–16; and Larry Paul Fuller, “Building the Kingdom,” Texas Architect 35 ( Janu-
ary-February 1985): 60–61. Strangely enough, in Arabic the word façade means
“corruption” (Shiber, Recent Arab City Growth, 214).
40. See John Close, “The Towers of Silence,” Saudi Business, November 16, 1979,
cited in Kaizer Talib, Shelter in Saudi Arabia (London and New York: Academy/
St. Martin’s Press, 1984), 128; Abdelmohsen M. Farahat and M. Numan Cebeci,
“A Housing Project,” in Serageldin and El-Sadek, The Arab City, 303–11; and Shiber,
“Public Housing Policy Needed in Arab World,” Recent Arab City Growth, 197–201.
On the camps, see Hasan-Uddin Khan, “Introductionary [sic] Essay—Expressing
Identities through Architecture,” in Kahn and Frampton, World Architecture, vol.
5, xxix, xl.
41. RMJM’s conservation of Jeddah’s Old Town won an Aga Khan Award.
On the evolution of the city, see James Buchanan, Jeddah Old and New (London:
Stacey International, 1980); Saleh A. Al-Hathloul, “City Profile—Jeddah,” Cities
8 (November 1991): 267– 71; Kamel A. Komsani, “Jeddah,” in Arab Architecture: Past
and Present, ed. Antony Hutt (Durham, N.C.: Centre for Middle Eastern & Islamic
Studies, 1983), 39–41; Mohammed Scharabi, “The New Town of Jubail and the
Civic Center at Jedda,” in Islamic Cairo, ed. Michael Meinecke (London: Deutsches
Archäologisches Institut Art and Archaeology Research Papers, 1980), 100–104;

Global Ambition and Local Knowledge 249

N. S. Farsi and H. I. Amer, “Islamic Architectural Features in the Arabian Penin-
sula and Their Reflection in Planning Old and New Jeddah,” in Serageldin and
El-Sadek, The Arab City, 184–90; and Angelo Pesce, Jiddah: Portrait of an Arabian
City (Tucson, Ariz.: Falcon Press, 1974).
42. “Profile of El-Wakil,” Mimar 1 ( July-September 1981): 5, 47; Chris Abel,
“Work of El-Wakil,” Architectural Review 180 (November 1986): 52–60; Saleem Sha-
hed, “Abedl Wahed El-Wakil,” Arts and the Islamic World 1 (Winter 1983–84): 56–64;
and Peter Rawstone, “A Bridge between Two Cultures [Interview],” RIBA Jour-
nal 97 (October 1990): 36–90.
43. Riyadh Album, 13. In addition to works already cited, other relevant pub-
lications on Riyadh include William Facey, Riyadh, The Old City (London: IMMEL
Publishing, 1992); Facey, Dir’iyyah and the First Saudi State (London: Stacey Inter-
national, 1997); Udo Kultermann, “Riyadh—The Arab City of the Twentieth Cen-
tury,” Arcus ( January-February 1985): 84–90; Kultermann, “Contemporary Arab
Architecture,” Mimar 16 (April-June 1985): 42–53; Kultermann, Contemporary Archi-
tecture in the Arab States, 127–66; and M. A. Al-Hammad, “Riyadh: City of the
Future,” Cities 10 (February 1993): 16–23.
44. See Franco Albini et al., Kasr-el-Hokm Area Revelopment Project Report
(Riyadh, 1974); Tentori, “From Architecture of Petrodollars to Architecture for
New Man,” including Marco Albini, “Urban Design,” 114; Ali Shuaibi and Saleh
Al-Hathloul, “The Justice Palace District, Riyadh,” in Ŝevienko, Continuity and
Change, 37–84; and Al-Hammad, “Riyadh: City of the Future,” 16–23. As bureau-
cracy expanded in the 1980s, so too did the Qasr el-Hokm district. The Jordan-
ian Rasem Badran added a huge new mosque, courthouse, and museum complex
(1979–92), and Ali Shuaibi of the Saudi Beeah Group built another courthouse
at the Al-Kindi Plaza (1981–86). Each emphasized continuity with the past and
continuity between architecture and the surrounding urban fabric; both received
Aga Khan awards, as did Henning Larson’s adjacent Ministry of Foreign Aªairs.
45. Facey, Dir’iyyah and the First Saudi State, 48–61. Badran’s additions of the
1990s suggest a growing tension about culture, memory, and modern space (see
Badran, “On the Poetics of Place,” in Understanding Islamic Architecture, ed. Attilio
Petruccioli and Khalil K. Pirani [London: Routledge Curzon, 2002], 105–10; and
Badran, “Historical References and Contemporary Design,” in Theories and Prin-
ciples of Design in the Architecture of Islamic Societies, ed. Margaret Bentley Ŝevienko
[Cambridge, Mass.: Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT and Har-
vard, 1988], 149–59).
46. Tentori, “From Architecture of Petrodollars to Architecture for New Man,”
111.
47. See, in particular, Fazlur R. Khan, “The Islamic Environment,” in Toward an

250 Gwendolyn Wright

Architecture in the Spirit of Islam, ed. Renata Holod (Singapore: Aga Khan Awards,
1980), 32–43; Khan, “The Future of High Rise Structures,” Progressive Architecture
53 (October 1972): 78–85; Khan, “The Bearing Wall Comes of Age,” Architectural
and Engineering News 10 (October 1968): 64–67; and Hasan-Uddin Khan, “Profile:
Fazlur R. Khan,” Mimar, no. 4 (April-June 1982): 35.
48. Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, Urban Design Middle East (Chicago: Skid-
more, Owings & Merrill, 1978), 8. The pamphlet cites Rudofsky’s Architecture with-
out Architects and Rapoport’s House, Form, and Culture as key sources.
49. See Janet Abu-Lughod, “The Islamic City”; Albert Hourani and Samuel M.
Stern, eds., The Islamic City (Oxford: Cassirer; Philadelphia: University of Penn-
sylvania Press, 1970).
50. Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, Urban Design Middle East, 8.
51. See Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha’s Men (Cambridge and New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1997); Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt.
52. The best book on the city’s history remains Janet L. Abu-Lughod’s Cairo:
1001 Years of the City Victorious (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971),
although books by André Raymond (Cairo, 1993; Cambridge: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 2000); Max Rodenbeck, Cairo: The City Victorious (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1999); and Samir Raafat, Cairo, the Glory Years (Alexandria: Harpocrates
Publishing, 2003) provide captivating recent interpretations.
53. Architecture for the Poor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973),
Fathy’s lyrical account of his work in New Gourna, was based on his earlier, state-
sponsored version, Gourna: A Tale of Two Villages (Cairo: Ministry of Culture, 1969),
also written in English. See also T. Mitchell, “Making the Nation,” in Consuming
Tradition, Manufacturing Heritage, ed. Nezar AlSayyad (London and New York:
Routledge, 2001), 235; and N. Al Sayyad, “From Vernacularism to Globalism,” Tra-
ditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 7 (1995): 13–24.
54. Fathy quoted in the World Bank’s “Staª Appraisal Report: Arab Repub-
lic of Egypt Tourism Project” (1979), cited in Mitchell, “Making the Nation,” 218.
By the 1980s, the government had banned the use of alluvial mud for traditional
brick-making, hoping to limit the further loss of fertile soil for agriculture. Mitchell
notes that the new eªorts to relocate villagers into “minuscule and nondescript
concrete-and-red-brick boxes” now include an ethnographic film about the vil-
lage that is to be destroyed.
55. Al-’Imara (no. 5/6 [1945]) called “for a National Style of Architecture in
Egypt” (cited in Mercedes Volait, L’Architecture moderne en Egypt (Cairo: Ameri-
can University of Cairo Press, 1993), 73. A special issue published in 1952 covered
“Modern Architecture in Brazil.” Karim had trained as an architect in Zurich
in the mid-1930s. See also Terek Mohamed Rafast Sukr, Early Twentieth-Century

Global Ambition and Local Knowledge 251

Islamic Architecture in Cairo (Cairo: American University of Cairo Press, 1993); and
Udo Kultermann, “Contemporary Arab Architecture.” The Social Building and
the Engineers Syndicate were exceptions. I have not been able to consult Ms.
Volait’s Ph.D. dissertation, “Architects et architectures de l’Égypte moderne
(1820–1969).”
56. Ronald Lewcock, “Conservation in Islamic Cairo,” in The Expanding
Metropolis, ed. Ahmet Evin (Singapore: Concept Media for the Aga Khan Award
for Architecture, 1984), 50.
57. Jim Antoniou, “The Exploding City,” Arts and the Islamic World 2 (Winter
1984–85): 35. Michael Sorkin points out that, with 20 million people, at 29 people
per acre, the density today is six times that of Mexico City. Cairo’s population
continues to grow by some 350,000 per year (Sorkin, “Deciphering Greater Cairo,”
Architectural Record 189 [April 2001]: 83).
58. Many elements of the plan, including the focus on and sites for public hous-
ing on the West Bank of the Nile, had first been explored in Mahmoud Riad’s
1932 thesis in Civic Design at the University of Liverpool’s School of Architec-
ture (see Volait, “Town Planning Schemes for Cairo,” in Mass Mediations, ed. Wal-
ter Armbrust [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000], 44– 70; and Volait,
L’Architecture moderne, 97–98).
59. Abu-Lughod, Cairo, 182–220.
60. Miles Copeland, The Game of Nations (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1969), 148–50; Raafat, Cairo, 213–15; Desmond Stewart, Cairo [“Cities of the
World” series] (London: Phoenix House, 1965), 73; and Annabel Wharton, Build-
ing the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 41–54.
61. Volait, “Town Planning Schemes for Cairo,” 63.
62. See Abu-Lughod, Cairo, 166; Farha Ghannam, “The Visual Remaking of
Urban Space,” Visual Anthropology 10 (1998): 265–80; Ghannan, Remaking the Mod-
ern, 6, 27–28; Frederic Shorter, Cairo’s Leap Forward (Cairo: American University
of Cairo Press, 1989); Nawal Mahmoud Hassan, “Social Aspects of Urban Hous-
ing in Cairo,” Mimar 17 ( July-September 1985): 59–61; Abou-Zeid Rageh, “The
Changing Pattern of Housing in Cairo,” in The Expanding Metropolis, 133–48.
63. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, “Cairo: A Sociological Profile,” in Saqqaf, The Mid-
dle East City, 213; Mona Serageldin, “Cairo—1800–2000,” 91–119, and Mohammed
Salah-Eddin Hegab, “New Towns Policy,” both in The Expanding Metropolis,
91–119, 171–91. Today, Nasr City has a population of more than 3 million living
in modern high-rises.
64. Ibrahim, “Cairo: A Sociological Profile,” 214. See also Raymond Hinne-
busch Jr., Egyptian Politics under Sadat (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1985); John Waterbury, The Egypt of Nasser and Sadat (Princeton:

252 Gwendolyn Wright

Princeton University Press, 1983); and Sadat’s aptly named autobiography, In Search
of Identity (Glasgow: Collins, 1978).
65. The economically strategic cities of the Suez Canal Zone, virtually aban-
doned after extensive Israeli bombing during the 1967 war, epitomize the dual
approach to housing that now prevailed. In 1973, the UNDP and a consortium
of British consultants, led by the ubiquitous RMJM, undertook “realistic” mas-
ter plans for Suez and Port Saïd. Culpin Planning used a radical alternative at
nearby Ismailia, upgrading the existing informal settlements and securing title
rights for some 90,000 residents. While Culpin’s project received an Aga Khan
Award in 1986, a waterside tourist facility soon shifted development priorities back
to the more familiar pattern (see “Housing in the Suez Canal Towns, “Third World
Planning Review 3 (May 1981): 8–200, especially Forbes Davidson, “Ismailia,”
161– 78; and Ismaïl Serageldin, “Ismailia Development Project, Ismailia, Egypt,”
in The Architecture of Empowerment, ed. Ismail Serageldin (London: Academy,
1997), 102– 3.
66. Ashraf Salama, “Contemporary Cairo Demystified,” Archis no. 1 (2002):
29– 32; Rageh, “The Changing Pattern of Housing in Cairo,” 133, 138; Mildred F.
Schmertz, “Coping with Cairo,” Architectural Record 173 (May 1985): 91; Al-Ahram
(December 29, 1979, p. 3, and December 27, 1979, p. 3), cited in Ghannan, Remak-
ing the Modern, 30, 32. Ghannan notes that the separate rooms with functional
labels (e.g., “kitchen” or “bedroom”) of Sadat-era masaakin emphasized greater
privacy and more rational use of space than did Nasser-era projects. As with other
“modern” public housing of the 1970s, female residents complained about
smaller rooms and more isolated home life (Ghannan, Remaking the Modern, 43–
66). Even cemeteries became squatters’ housing, including the City of the Dead,
with its remarkable Islamic monuments.
67. See Jim Antoniou, “Historic Cairo,” Architectural Review 203 (March 1998):
73; George T. Scanlon, “Municipal Planning and Archaeology,” in Serageldin and
El-Sadek, The Arab City, 230– 34. The current population of Medieval Cairo is esti-
mated to be over 1.5 million.
68. Under Nasser, the annual maintenance budget for all registered medieval
monuments in the city was only £600 (Rodenbeck, Cairo, 170).
69. The most spectacular result was the German intervention in the Darb
Qirmiz, beginning in 1977, which became the nucleus for Cairo’s first conserva-
tion area (see Antoniou, “Historic Cairo,” 75– 77; Michael Meinecke, “The Darb
Qirmiz Project,” in Islamic Cairo, 42–46). The site received an Aga Khan Award
for preservation in 1983.
70. See N. AlSayyad, I. A. Bierman, and N. Rabbat, eds., Making Cairo Medieval
(Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2005); Caroline Williams, “Transforming the

Global Ambition and Local Knowledge 253

Old,” Middle East Journal 59 (2002): 458– 75; Florian Steinberg, “Architecture and
Townscape in Today’s Cairo,” Ekistics 38 (1991): 75–86; Evin, The Expanding
Metropolis, 49–90 (on conservation programs). Cairo was chosen as the site of
the 1989 Aga Khan Award for Architecture, to focus attention on the collective
nature of this historical legacy (see James Steele, ed., Architecture for Islamic Soci-
eties Today [London: Academy, 1994]). A mark of the ongoing appeal is Neil Mac-
Farquhar, “The Beating Heart of Medieval Cairo,” New York Times Magazine
(September 12, 2004): 27– 35.
71. Preface to Jim Antoniou, Islamic Cities and Conservation (Paris: Unesco Press,
1981), 5.
72. E.g., see Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Mitchell, ed., Questions of Moder-
nity; Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs (Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 2000); Beatriz Sarlo, Scenes from Postmodern Life (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism
(New York: Norton, 2006); Alexander Tzonis, Liane Lefaivre, and Bruno Stagno,
eds., Tropical Architecture (West Sussex: John Wiley, 2001); and Jyoti Hosagrahar,
Indigenous Modernities (London and New York: Routledge, 2005).
73. Cliªord Geertz put it eloquently: “To see ourselves as others see us can
be eye-opening,” he wrote in the introduction to a collection of his essays. “But
it is from the far more di‹cult achievement of seeing ourselves amongst others,
as a local example of the forms of human life locally taken, a case among cases,
a world among worlds, that the largeness of mind, without which objectivity is
self-congratulation and tolerance a sham, comes” (Geertz, Local Knowledge [New
York: Basic Books, 1983], 16).
74. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 2000).

254 Gwendolyn Wright

10 From Modernism to Globalization
The Middle East in Context

nezar a l sayyad

L ooking at the problems of cities today, one cannot ignore the revo-
lutionary developments that have occurred in the world since the
1960s. Trends such as the transnationalization of capital, the inter-
nationalization of labor, the steady increase in global trading and commu-
nication, and the ensuing competition between cities have led individuals,
businesses, industries, and governments to attempt to position themselves
globally.1 It follows that in a globally compressed world, constituted of
national societies that are becoming increasingly aware of their ethnic and
racial roots, the conditions for the identification of individual and collective
selves become very complex.2 It is important to take into account that any
theory of globalization must recognize the distinctive cultural and unequal
conditions under which the notion of the “global” was constructed.3 It also
becomes di‹cult to comprehend globalization without recognizing the his-
torical specificity of traditional cultures, their colonization, and their later
emergence as nation-states.
At the heart of all of these issues is the question of identity. We see this
very clearly in no place more than we do in the Middle East, where the very
problematic traditional/modern dialectic is often invoked. Of course, all soci-
eties are constructed in relation to one another and produced, represented,
and perceived through the ideologies and narratives of situated discourse.4
For example, the definition of the “Middle East” as a category is very much
dependent on the existence of a “West.” Both terms are mainly defined in

255
diªerence, constructed in opposition to the other, produced in a variety of
postcolonial and anticolonial discourses, although neither of them constitutes
a monolithic preexisting real subject itself.5

periodizing modernity in the middle east

In studying the relationship between the West and the Middle East and its
eªect on the corresponding identity of people and architecture, three his-
toric phases may be discerned: the colonial period, the era of independence
and nation-state building, and, the most recent phase, globalization. These
phases appear to have been accompanied by three respective urban forms:
the hybrid, the modern or pseudo-modern, and the postmodern. In this essay,
I hope to demonstrate how constructed the notion of the Middle East has
been and to show the fluidity of identity under both colonial and global con-
ditions, often invoking examples from Egypt and other Arab counties in the
Middle East. But I also want to make explicit that this historical periodiza-
tion and the attempt to theorize modernity in the entire Middle East will
always be an abstract exercise. Generalization about the diverse countries of
the Middle East, a fragile geopolitical entity whose existence as a single cul-
tural unit, can and should be always called into question, and may only be
justified in the pursuit of general cultural knowledge of the region.
Before the era of colonialism in most of the Middle East, settlements largely
took the form of traditional communities under pre-industrial and often insu-
lar conditions. Although some forms of economic exchange occurred between
this world and that of the developed world, curiosity about the “other” was
limited. The vernacular forms of dwellings and settlements were shaped pri-
marily by sociocultural concerns and the surrounding natural environments.
They also reflected, possibly at the subconscious level, the identity of their
inhabitants.
Around the middle of the nineteenth century, the world witnessed the rise
of modern industrial capitalism and the emergence of organized political
dominance, represented by colonialism. The paradigm shift from the tradi-
tional to the colonial created a relationship of unequal cultural and socio-
economic exchange. And, if one analyzes the issues of identity in the Middle
East, one must take this fact into account and understand the processes by
which identity was violated, ignored, distorted, or stereotyped throughout
history. For once the “backwardness” of this traditional Middle East popula-
tion was established (at least in the minds of the great mass of citizens in the
colonial motherland), reform was legitimatized. This series of events did not

256 Nezar AlSayyad

necessarily have an eªect on the physical fabric of cities; everywhere the
colonists went, they introduced their own brand of settlements.
The colonization process aªected the overall planning model that deter-
mined the patterns of urban development. This was the era when modernist
ideas flowed from the countries of the West to the Middle East. Ironically, in
the 1950s and 1960s, when many Middle East countries launched their wars
of liberation and independence, the colonists resorted to an age-old urban
strategy. Hundreds of traditional villages were destroyed in order to regroup
the population in checkerboard resettlement towns under the banner of mod-
ernization. This uprooting operation, as in the case of the Algerian war, was
meant to break the subversive influence of the rebels, rather than to improve
conditions for the local population. The colonial era thus resulted in a hybrid
urban condition and, subsequently, a certain architectural and urban language
began to emerge, at least at the visual level, that unified the countries of the
Middle East ruled by certain colonial empires—British, French, Italian, etc.
When the people of the Middle East started to rebel against this colonial
world order, they had little conceptual language to employ in their drive to
establish sovereignty. Often they were forced to use the terms of the exist-
ing order, with all its baggage of physical realities and ideological constructs,
like the nation-state. Groups of people living in one region under a colonial
power (but of diªerent religions, languages, ethnicities, and traditions, as in
the case of Iraq and Sudan), sharing little more than a colonial history, had
to band together to achieve this new, “more advanced” stage of independence.
The new political and governing bodies highlighted what few commonali-
ties existed, and suppressed diªerences, in pursuit of the larger goal of free-
dom and independence. A national identity based on shorter-term political
interest and the ideology of struggle emerged as the driving force behind many
nationalist movements in the Middle East. Once independence was achieved,
the glue that bound together the various groups no longer held. Indeed, the
long ethnic civil wars in Sudan and the recent American occupation of Iraq
have exposed these weaknesses in those states. The continuing conflicts
between the diªerent ethnic groups that formed these countries are testa-
ment to the true associations of their native populations, where ethnic origin
or religious a‹liation have been, or have reemerged as the prime definer of
their collective identity.6
Again, the second phase of independence struggles and nationalism did
not necessarily improve the quality of the built environment in the Middle
East, nor did it resolve the conflicts that plagued the traditional settlements
of those countries. During the era of colonialism, important and irre-

From Modernism to Globalization 257

versible decisions were made that aªected the production of the built envi-
ronment. In the Arab Middle East, for example, new building codes requir-
ing setbacks (based on Western norms) forced the traditional courtyard house
out of existence in Egypt and much of the Arabian Peninsula. New construc-
tion often took the form of banal single-family dwellings that were unsuited
for the climate of the Middle East. Also, in such societies, where privacy was
cherished, major adaptations of these new forms were required. In some
countries, entire e‹cient systems of construction were abandoned because
they did not suit the modern era. The urban system fell grossly out of bal-
ance, and the urban environment of many Middle Eastern countries’ soci-
eties became pseudo-modernized.7
An obsession with modernity accompanied the early years of national-
ism and independence and preoccupied most governments in the Middle East,
including the most conservative ones. As a result, the Western, particularly
European, pattern of urban development continued to serve as the main frame
of reference, especially for the urban middle classes who stepped in after inde-
pendence to run the various bureaucracies of these new nation-states. Dur-
ing this period, after World War II, the construction of public housing was
pursued in many parts of the world both, as an instrument of rebuilding and
as a mechanism to achieve social justice. Despite the failures of many public
housing projects in the West, the international influence of modernism was
strong enough to assure that this public-housing model would be often copied
in the Middle East without questioning its stability. Here, as with other devel-
oping nations, Middle East governments in rich and poor states alike often
used public-housing projects as an instrument of nation-building in an
attempt to gain the allegiance of the new citizenry. In Egypt, for example,
under the nationalist-socialist regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser, thousands of
public-housing blocks were built across the country. Suªering under the usual
problems of such development—lack of maintenance, empty and unused
spaces, the need to accommodate expanding families—many residents took
matters into their own hands and took over these projects by reappropriat-
ing them in novel ways. Some built additions into public spaces, others took
over ground floors to use as private vegetable gardens, and, in some cases,
the project’s community collaborated in erecting small neighborhood
mosques to camouflage their interventions, which revealed a new tendency
to resort to the power of religion to achieve their goals. Both ethnicity (e.g.,
Kurdish, Berber, Nubian) and religion (in this case, Islam) were becoming the
preeminent forms of community identification in the Middle East.
We may consider globalization as the third phase in the relationship

258 Nezar AlSayyad

between the Middle East and the West, particularly at a time when the search
for and the reconstruction of identity has become paramount. Once inde-
pendence was achieved and the dust from the struggle had settled, the prob-
lems of national and community harmony began to surface. Where these
issues were resolved, religious and political fundamentalisms began to flour-
ish. To understand the impact of these forces on urbanism, closer attention
must be paid to the di‹culties associated with defining national identity. The
primary elements of nation identity—race, language, religion, history, ter-
ritory, and tradition—have always been essential but unequal components in
its formation. The political units that formed most nations in the Middle East
after the two World Wars were expected to be homogenous entities with a
common culture. But the reality was otherwise, as these nation-states were
mainly put together by international deals that displayed little interest in the
will of the people who inhabited these lands. Again, Iraq is a case in point.
National identity as perceived by a government is inherently tied to the
image it wishes to project in the international arena. Many Middle Eastern
governments resorted to using local and foreign architects to help them
create such a new national style. While many of these post-independence
projects continued the modernist schema, some others totally retreated to
older traditional forms, and sometimes to newly invented ones that claimed
to be based on specific historical periods. The work of Ramzy Omar and Ali
Nassar in Egypt was an extension of the modernist schema, but with a lot of
attention to issues of climate and abstract symbolism. These two architects
helped build a large number of structures for the newly constituted public
sector in Egypt, which included hotels, schools, clubs, and even structures
for Egypt’s single party at the time, the Arab Socialist Union, representing
the attempt to devise a modern architecture for Egypt that was based on uni-
versal principles but adapted for the Egyptian context. Anyone who lived in
Egypt in the 1960s easily recognizes these buildings today, which are often
referred to as the Socialist Architecture of Egypt. I am not only talking about
these public buildings, but also about the vast numbers of five-story public-
housing walk-ups discussed earlier.
There were a few who had earlier rejected the Western styles altogether,
and here architect Hassan Fathy stands out as the lone ranger. His village of
New Gourna, near Luxor, Egypt, provides an interesting story of grudging
critical acclaim. New Gourna was planned in the 1950s as the new home for
residents of an old settlement that existed among the archaeological sites of
the ancient Theban necropolis, whom the Egyptian government wanted to
evict from their houses. Fathy designed the village using elaborate mud-brick

From Modernism to Globalization 259

structures that he imagined represented indigenous traditions. However, in
his search for the ideal vernacular form, he turned to the geometries and pro-
portions of Islamic styles, particularly Mamluk, which had flourished in
medieval Cairo several centuries earlier. Among other things, this resulted in
the use of unfamiliar forms (domes and vaults) for the project, which the local
people associated with the tombs and shrines of the dead. New Gourna was
an elegant depiction of an idea, but when the villagers who were meant to live
there refused to move in, the attempt to create a new community with no
real economic or social justification was revealed as a costly mistake. And in
the end it became all too clear that Fathy’s true concern was with his standing
among his Western architectural peers, not his struggling Egyptian colleagues.
Nevertheless, on account of the publicity of his eªort to adapt indigenous
architectural forms to create a national style, and after winning the distin-
guished Aga Khan Award for Architecture, Fathy became something of a guru
among Middle Eastern architects.8
Today, examples of Fathy-like architecture are widespread in the Egyptian
landscape, often giving the mistaken impression that this is what vernacular
architecture in Egypt has always looked like. What Fathy had inadvertently
done was to resuscitate an old tradition, or to simply invent a new one based
on an imagined continuous history and an assumed homogenous commu-
nity, when neither existed. His project is, in fact, an excellent example of how
architecture can provide some of the best illustrations to Benedict Anderson’s
brilliant and important thesis about imagined communities.9 Only time will
tell whether the imagery that Fathy created in Gourna will become a lasting
national Egyptian style, unlike the short-lived modern style that emerged in
Egypt’s socialist period.
Of course, identity cannot be based on some myth from precolonial
times. Many Middle Eastern nations have resorted to a past in which iden-
tity may coalesce as a solace against the perceived dominator, often forget-
ting that respect for the past must also include accepting and coming to terms
with the architectural and urban legacy of colonization itself. In the 1920s
and 1930s, when it was a monarchy, Egypt often resorted to its Pharaonic
past to establish the symbols of its new nationhood. But its architects and
planners, like Fathy, often borrowed more from its Islamic heritage as well.
Other architects simply invoked both traditions without resolving any pos-
sible contradictions, and that resulted in interesting hybrid forms that some
may consider uniquely Egyptian but still modernist. The work of Ali Labib
Gabr is a good example of this creative but small group of practitioners from
the 1940s.

260 Nezar AlSayyad

globalization, identity, and the “other”
in the middle east
The problem of national identity is of course complicated by the extensive
economic exchanges that characterize the world today. Not only do Middle
Eastern nations have to mediate between precolonial and colonial legacies,
between the traditional and the modern, but they must also deal with the
eªects of globalization and the New World Order. “Globalization” here refers
to the process by which the world is becoming a single economic entity, char-
acterized by information exchange, interconnected modes of production, and
flows of labor and capital within a predominately capitalist world system.
Indeed, the considerable migration from the former colonies in the Middle
East and North Africa to the lands of their former colonizers in Europe and
the infiltration of these ethnic subcultures into mainstream European soci-
eties cannot be dismissed. In fact, this demographic change has often been
the cause of social conflict as these local subcultures, often Muslims, have
resorted to ethnic, racial, or religious allegiances to keep from being swal-
lowed up by the majority culture.10 The current attempts at multicultural-
ism in Europe, and the struggles, often failed, of many European governments
to cope with their minority Muslim populations, usually from Middle East-
ern countries, may be a good example of a strategy to embrace diªerence as
a fundamental constituent of national identity. It is ironic that as the national
identity of the former European colonizers is being discussed and reassessed,
often in an attempt to become more inclusive, the national identity of the
formerly colonized nations of the Middle East and North Africa, like much
of Eastern Europe and South Asia, is moving in the opposite direction, and
is often becoming more exclusive and more directly linked to national origin
or religious association. Indeed, the twentieth century has witnessed the return
of states where belonging to a particular religious or ethnic group is a pre-
requisite for the enjoyment of full citizenship rights or status.11 Here, Israel
and Iran may be cases in point.
We must remember, however, that national identity is always undergoing
a process of transformation and flux. While the contradictory forces of glob-
alization may be playing havoc with traditional loyalties and values and chal-
lenging older ideologies and practices, a single “world culture” inclusive of
Middle Eastern traditions remains a distant prospect. Thus, as Benjamin Bar-
ber points out in his appropriately titled book, Jihad vs. McWorld, Middle East-
ern and Islamic nations want the veil, but they also want the World Wide
Web and Coca Cola.12 Timothy Mitchell, on the other hand, argued that Jihad

From Modernism to Globalization 261

is not antithetical to the development of McWorld, and that McWorld is really
McJihad, a necessary combination of a variety of social logics and economic
forces, often driven by and benefiting from the advances in communication
technology that led to the emergence, particularly in the Middle East, of the
current Jihadist movements, like Al-Qaida in the Muslim World.13 Here, some
Middle Eastern countries evolve their own local appropriations of many West-
ern practices without ever embracing their logic. Similarly, for its part, the
West continues to be interested in consuming the cultures and environments
of Middle Eastern societies because of the exotic diªerences they oªer, but
without accepting their underlying premise. A good example here may be
the fascination or the fixation that some Western countries have with Mid-
dle Eastern monuments and their emergence as financial patrons for monu-
ment preservation as part of what they define as “universal” heritage, even
when the natives of those Middle Eastern and Central Asian countries, who
are mainly Muslim, do not recognize or accept the historic value of such struc-
tures. The dynamiting of the Buddha Statues in Bamian, Afghanistan, under
the Taliban regime is a case in point.
I have argued elsewhere that most people usually exhibit two conflicting
sentiments toward tradition, culture, and the past. The first is to resort to cul-
ture and tradition out of fear of change—change that in and of itself may
be inevitable. But protectionism against the unknown or the unfamiliar can,
and often does, turn into fundamentalism. Some may simplistically argue that
this position oªers an explanation for the attitudes of some Middle Eastern
nations and their people toward the West, but I believe that the matter is more
complex than that and requires a more global perspective. The second sen-
timent, characterized by interest in the culture of the mysterious “other,” an
idea that generated the initial interest of European orientalists in the Middle
East, emerges from a totally diªerent feeling, that is, the desire to have the
choice to merge with the “other” and share in a wider or a diªerent collec-
tive consciousness. Indeed, we see this sentiment clearly represented among
groups of Middle Easterners living in the West who have become thoroughly
Westernized and are no longer interested in or comfortable with their Mid-
dle Eastern heritage, as well as among groups of Europeans and Americans
who are residents and lovers of particular Middle Eastern countries. The
tremendous movement of citizens across borders and the rise of protected
ethnic minorities demonstrate that the two sentiments, both legitimate, are
not necessarily contradictory. In fact, they may indeed occur simultaneously,
or, alternatively, based on time and place.14 I would argue that the interplay
between these two sentiments shapes much of the attitudes of many First

262 Nezar AlSayyad

and Third World peoples, particularly those in the Middle East. It is here that
much work and analysis need to be done to unpack the complexities of the
relationships between the “Middle East” and the “West.”
For those interested in the study of culture and urbanism in the Middle
East in the era of globalization, there are some lessons to be learned.15 First,
one may argue that even as the many diªerent nations converge into a “world
culture,” it is a culture marked by the management of diversity, rather than
by the replication of uniformity. This so-called world culture, an idea made
possible during the heyday of modernization, remains essentially a culture
of dominant groups, in which the persistent diversity of the constituent local
culture—as is the case with many Middle Eastern societies—is often a prod-
uct of globalization itself. The second lesson involves the connection between
this world culture and the nature and form of space and place as this culture
is increasingly placeless. Indeed, it is a culture created through the rapid inter-
connectedness of local, national, and foreign communities, through flows of
information whose logic is largely uncontrolled by any specific local society
but whose impacts shape the lives of all these local societies.16 Nowhere can
this be better observed than in the Middle East. Here, the impact on urban-
ism is that cultural experience, even in the supposedly traditional Middle East,
which is notorious for its resistance to change, will likely become less place-
rooted and more information-based.
The case of the Middle East may in fact convince us that the so called “uni-
versal modernism,” if one can talk about such a thing, is only or mainly a
European phenomenon. The permanently hybrid nature of architecture and
urbanism in the Middle East make it impossible to accept this “universal”
notion. Hence, the rising tide of placelessness will not likely generate a uni-
form global response, since the underlying cultural diversity will find new
and yet to be known means to manifest itself. Placelessness will not eventu-
ally undermine cultural diversity, but it will require diªerent practices for the
construction of the multiple and increasingly complex identities of the
people of the Middle East.
Finally, and despite the world’s preoccupation with globalization, the his-
tory of the world demonstrates a movement toward cultural diªerentiation
and not homogenization, in which each individual belongs to many cultures
and people have multiple cultural identities. In this sense, identity is always
under construction and in constant evolution. For if hybridity is accepted as
an inherent constituent of national identity, then the ensuing urbanism must
be accepted as only a reflection of a specific transitional stage in the life of
any society.17 Indeed, globalization has made the issues of identity and rep-

From Modernism to Globalization 263

resentation in urbanism very cumbersome and has cast doubt on urbanism’s
ability to fully represent the peoples, nations, and cultures within which it
exists. But since culture has become increasingly placeless, urbanism will likely
become one of the few remaining arenas where one may observe how local
cultures mediate global domination. Again, here the countries of the Mid-
dle East will be prime sites for such observations. But as the nations of this
globalizing Middle East become more conscious of their religious convictions
and ethnic roots, they are likely to seek forms and norms that represent these
sub-identities, even if these send confused messages to a global audience that
will ultimately deal with them through the spaces of flows.
In the end, while some may argue that there is a world of diªerence between
the “true” modernity of a First World city like London or Paris and the “appar-
ent” modernity of a Cairo or Beirut, much new research has demonstrated
that citizens of Middle Eastern countries are articulating a project of active
citizenship outside of the traditional institutional and state arenas. It is a unique
modernity cognizant of the surrounding global and transnational current.18
Whether the diªerent nations that constitute the Middle East will be able to
develop a new political culture and a spatial articulation beyond the slogans of
traditionalism, religious revival, and anti-modernity is yet to be seen. The new
claims to citizenship that have emerged recently may simply be a response to
the perceived threat of the rising American Empire with its alternative democ-
ratizing models, as hegemonic as these may be. This raises for me the most
important issue in studying modernity and modernism in the Middle East.
In All That Is Solid Melts into Air, Marshall Berman brilliantly illustrated how
the modernity of Paris and St. Petersburg in the mid-nineteenth century was
a modernity based on urban encounters in the newly-opened boulevards,
which, in Paris, were often cut from the traditional fabric of the medieval city.19
These new public spaces allowed the rich and the poor to come together in
physical contact in new and unprecedented ways. Berman showed how this
apparently similar modernity in both of these cities captured very diªerent
meanings. In Paris, it was a modernity of class encounter grounded in a par-
ticular liberal traditions, whereas in St. Petersburg, Berman argues, it was a
“modernity of underdevelopment,” bearing the apparent forms of the mod-
ern but lacking its processes, and marked more by a mix of mimicry and envy.
The globalizing changes that the Middle East has undergone in the last
couple of decades, particularly in its confrontation with the West following
the repercussions of 9/11, have opened up new experiences of modernity à
la Berman. Are today’s exclusive malls of Cairo, Beirut, Dubai, and Doha,
where the totally veiled mix comfortably with the skimpily dressed, the new

264 Nezar AlSayyad

boulevards of a unique Middle Eastern modernity?20 Will the attempt to rec-
oncile “MacWorld” and Jihad lead to a new and diªerent modernity? Or will
we see a retreat to traditionalism without an abandonment of the fundamen-
tal premises of modernity, a sort of “Medieval Modernity” that deals with
the new parameters of survival in an ever changing and globalizing world?21
These are only a few of the important challenges that will face the theorists
and historians of modernity in the twenty-first century.

notes

1. See Anthony D. King, ed., Culture, Globalization, and the World-System (Bas-
ingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan, in association with the Department of Art and Art
History, SUNY at Binghamton, 1991).
2. Roland Robertson, “Social Theory, Cultural Relativity, and the Problems
of Globality,” in King, Culture, Globalization, and the World-System.
3. Many conceptions of globalization have been developed in the social sci-
ences or are rooted in economic theories. This essay mainly draws from the field
of cultural studies.
4. Janet Wolª, “The Global and the Specific: Reconsidering Conflicting The-
ories of Culture,” in King, Culture, Globalization, and the World-System.
5. See Stuard Hall, “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities,” in
King, Culture, Globalization, and the World-System.
6. Nezar AlSayyad, “Urbanism and the Dominance Equation,” in Forms of
Dominance, ed. Nezar AlSayyad (London: Avebury, 1992).
7. Nezar AlSayyad, “From Vernacularism to Globalism: The Temporal Real-
ity of Traditional Settlements,” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 7, no.
1 (1995): 13–24.
8. Ibid.
9. Benedict R. O’G. Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983).
10. Nezar AlSayyad and Manuel Castells, eds., Muslim Europe or Euro-Islam (Lan-
ham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2002).
11. Nezar AlSayyad, “Urbanism and the Dominance Equation,” in Forms of
Dominance, ed. Nezar AlSayyad (London: Avebury, 1992).
12. See Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995).
13. Timothy Mitchell, “McJihad: Islam in the U.S. Global Order,” Social Text
20, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 1–18.
14. Nezar AlSayyad, “Culture, Identity, and Urbanism in a Changing World,”
in Preparing for the Urban Future, ed. Michael A. Cohen et al. (Washington, D.C.:

From Modernism to Globalization 265

Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Baltimore: Distributed by the Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, 1996).
15. Many of these lessons are collected in a series of essays, by Anthony King,
Stuart Hall, Roland Robertson, Immanuel Wallenstein, Ulf Hannerz, and Janet
Wolª, among others. The essays are from a symposium held at the State Uni-
versity of New York, Binghamton, in 1989 (see King, Culture, Globalization, and the
World-System).
16. Manuel Castells, “The World Has Changed: Can Planning Change?” Land-
scape and Urban Planning 22, no. 1 (1992): 73– 78.
17. Nezar AlSayyad, ed., Hybrid Urbanism (New York: Prager, 2001).
18. Paul Amar and Diane Singerman, eds., Cairo Cosmopolitan (Cairo: Amer-
ican University in Cairo Press, 2006).
19. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air (New York: Penguin, 1988).
20. Nezar AlSayyad, “Whose Cairo?,” in Amar and Singerman, Cairo Cosmo-
politan, (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2006), 539ª.
21. Ananya Roy and Nezar AlSayyad, “Medieval Modernity: Citizenship in
Contemporary Urbanism,” Applied Anthropologist 25, no. 2 (2005): 147–65.

266 Nezar AlSayyad

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Sey, Y. “Cumhuriyet doneminde konut.” In 75 yilda degisen kent ve mimarlik,
edited by Y. Sey. Istanbul, 1998.
Wright, Alaister. “The Work of Translation: Turkish Modernism and the ‘Gen-
eration of 1914.’ ” In Edges of Empire: Orientalism and Visual Culture, edited by
Jocelyn Hackforth-Jones and Mary Roberts. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005.

Bibliography 287
Contributors

nezar alsayyad is Professor of Architecture, Planning and Urban History, and

Chair of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California at
Berkeley, as well as President of the International Association for the Study of
Traditional Environments (IASTE). He is the author and editor of many books,
including Cities & Caliphs (1991); Forms of Dominance (1993); Consuming Tradition
(2000); Hybrid Urbanism (2001); Muslim Europe/Euro Islam (2002); Urban Informal-
ity (2004); The End of Tradition (2004); Making Cairo Medieval (2005); and Cinematic
Urbanism (2006).

magnus t. bernhardsson teaches Middle Eastern History at Williams Col-

lege. He is the author of Reclaiming a Plundered Past: Archaeology and Nation-
Building in Modern Iraq (2005). He is now working on a book that will explore
U.S.-Iraqi relations between 1920 and 1990.

sibel bozdoğan teaches architectural history and theory courses at the Grad-
uate School of Design, Harvard University, and at Bilgi University, Istanbul. She
has published articles on the culture and politics of modern architecture, co-
authored a monograph on the Turkish architect Sedad Hakki Eldem (1987), and
co-edited an interdisciplinary volume, Rethinking Modernity and National Identity
in Turkey (1997). Her book, Modernism and Nation Building: Turkish Architectural
Culture in the Early Republic (2001), won the 2002 Alice Davis Hitchcock Award of

289
the Society of Architectural Historians, and the Koprulu Book Prize of the Turk-
ish Studies Association.

sandy isenstadt teaches the history of modern architecture for Yale Univer-
sity’s Department of the History of Art. He has written on post-World War II
reformulations of modernism by the well-known émigré architects Richard Neu-
tra and Josep Lluis Sert; on visual polemics in the urban proposals of Leon Krier
and Rem Koolhaas; and on the history of American refrigerators, picture win-
dows, landscape views, and real estate appraisals. His book, The Modern American
House: Spaciousness and Middle-Class Identity (2006), describes the visual enhance-
ment of spaciousness in the architectural, interior, and landscape design of Amer-
ican domestic design. His work has been supported with fellowships from the
National Endowment for the Humanities, the Graham Foundation for Advanced
Studies in the Fine Arts, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts.

waleed khleif, a poet, is former director of the Nazareth Documentation Cen-

ter and a member of the editorial committee of al-Mawaqib, a monthly literary
journal. He is the author of several books of poetry and historical studies of
Nazareth and pre–1948 Palestine.

roy kozlovsky is a doctoral candidate at the School of Architecture, Prince-

ton University, and teaches at Parsons, The New School for Design, in New York.
He has published articles on various aspects of postwar architecture, including
essays on the spatial practices of the Beat writers, Team Ten urbanism, and play-
ground design. His dissertation research on “Reconstruction through the Child:
English Modernism and the Welfare State” has been supported by a Whiting Fel-
lowship in the Humanities and a Woodrow Wilson Scholars Fellowship.

brian l. mclaren is an Associate Professor in the Department of Architec-

ture at the University of Washington, where he teaches architectural history and
theory courses and design. He has published essays on architecture and culture
during the period of the Italian colonization of Libya in the Journal of Decorative
and Propaganda Arts (2002) and in Muqarnas (2002), and had co-edited a volume
(with D. Medina Lasansky), Architecture and Tourism: Perception, Performance, and
Place (2004). His writings on architecture and tourism in Libya have also appeared
in Italian Colonialism (2005), and in his recently published Architecture and Tourism
in Italian Colonial Libya: An Ambivalent Modernism (2006). His current book project
is titled “Modern Architecture, Colonialism, and Race in Fascist Italy.”

290 Contributors
alona nitzan-shiftan is an architect, historian, and critic of the politics of
architecture in cross-cultural and interdisciplinary contexts with a focus on
post–World War II architectural culture. She holds a Ph.D. and an S.M.Arch.S.
from MIT and is a Senior Lecturer at the Technion’s Faculty of Architecture and
Town Planning in Israel. Her research was sponsored by the Center for Advanced
Study in the Visual Arts, the Getty/UCLA program, the Israel Science Founda-
tion, and currently by the Frankel Center at the University of Michigan. She lec-
tures and publishes widely on post–1967 Jerusalem, as well as on historiography,
preservation, national identity and globalization in Israel and the United States.
Her forthcoming book is titled Designing Politics: Architecture and the Making of
“United Jerusalem.”

panayiota i. pyla is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University

of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She holds a Ph.D. in the History and Theory of
Architecture from MIT, a Masters of Science in Architectural Studies, also from
MIT, and a Professional Degree in Architecture from Rensselaer Polytechnic Insti-
tute. Her essays on modern architecture, development, and environmental pol-
itics in the Middle East have appeared in the Journal of Architectural Education,
Docomomo, and Thresholds.

kishwar rizvi teaches the history of Islamic art and architecture as well as
seminars on modern architecture in the Middle East and South Asia. Her primary
research is on representations of religious and imperial authority in the art and
architecture of Safavid Iran, for which she has received an Alexander von Hum-
boldt Foundation award (2007–8). She is finishing her book, The Safavid Dynas-
tic Shrine: Architecture, Piety and Power in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Iran.
She has also written on issues of nationalism and religious identity in the mod-
ern art and architecture of Iran, with articles appearing in Muqarnas (2003, 2007).

susan slyomovics is Professor of Anthropology and Near Eastern Languages

and Cultures at the University of California at Los Angeles. Her books include
The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village (1998); Women
and Power in the Middle East (co-edited with Suad Joseph, 2001); The Walled Arab
City in Literature, Architecture, and History: The Living Medina in the Maghrib (2001);
and The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco (2005).

annabel wharton is the William B. Hamilton Professor of Art, Art History,

and Visual Studies at Duke University. She received her Ph.D. at the Courtauld Insti-
tute of the University of London. Initially, her work focused on Byzantine and Late

Contributors 291
Antique art, architecture, and urbanism; more recently, she has considered the rela-
tionship of modernity to pre-modernity, which she has written about in Building
the Cold War: Hilton International Hotels and Modern Architecture (2001), and Selling
Jerusalem: Relics, Replicas, Theme Parks (2006). She is currently working on a new
project on Architectural Agency, or How Abused Buildings Take Their Revenge.

gwendolyn wright is Professor of Architecture in Columbia University’s

Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. She has received
numerous fellowships, including a Guggenheim. She is the author of The Poli-
tics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (1991); scholarly essays about French archi-
tecture and urban design in Africa, North Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle
East; editor of The Formation of National Collections of Art and Archaeology (1995),
and the author of several books on American architecture and urbanism. She
received both her Masters degree in Architecture and her Ph.D. from the Univer-
sity of California at Berkeley.

292 Contributors
Index
Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations.
Aalborg museum (Denmark), 87
Aalto, Alvar, 87, 226
Abassy, Issam, 202
Abbasid period, 7, 83, 86, 88, 91
Aberdeen Free Press, 54
Abrams, Charles, 129
Achaemenid period, 10, 13
Afghanistan, 14, 262
Aga Khan Award for Architecture, 260
Al-Ali, Shaykh Ali Ibrahim, 202
Al-Ayubbi, Ali Jawdat, 87
Al-Azmeh, Aziz, 223
Al-Bahá, Sir Abbas Effendi Abd, 48
Albini, Franco, 236
Alexander, Christopher, 164, 170, 171
Algeria, 24, 62, 63
Algerian War, 257
Algiers, 7
Ali, Mehmet (pasha of Egypt), 236
Ali, Muhammad (viceroy and pasha of
Egypt), 41
Al-’Imara ( journal), 237
Al-Ittihad ( journal), 199, 200, 202
Al-Mansur, and circular plan of Baghdad
(8th century), 89
Al-Qaida, 262
Al-Qasim, General Abd al-Karim, 109
Al-Qasim, Samih, 202–6
Al-Rashid, Harun, 88
Al-Ruwad, 85
Allenby, General Edmund, 41
American Embassy Building Program,
23
Anderson, Benedict R. O’G., 31, 260
Anıt Kabir mausoleum (1953), 34n.33
Anglo-Palestine Bank, 48
Ankara, Turkey, 116; Academy of Fine
Arts, 15; Kocatepe Mosque, 25, 26,
26; Middle East Technical University,
School of Architecture, 123; Sky-
scraper (Gökdelen, 1959–64), 124
anthropology, 61, 99, 198, 222
anti-modern, 74, 264
Antoniou, Jim, 241, 242
Amir, Hana Sulayman, 195
apocalypse, 42, 56
293
Apollonj, Fabrizio Maria, 74 Baghdad University, 88–90, 101, 221–22,
Arabian American Oil Company 222
(Aramco), 230, 231 Balbo, Italo, 71
Aractingi, Jacques, 229 Balgat, Turkey, 118
Architectural Design ( journal), 168 Ballas, Shimon, 157, 158
Architectural Forum ( journal), 128 Baltimore, Maryland, 48
Architettura e Arti Decorative ( journal), Baqa al Gharbiya, Israel, 188
64, 69 Barber, Benjamin, 261
Arda, Orhan, 34n.33 Bauhaus, 226
Arizona State University, 93 Baysal, Haluk, 123, 130
Arkitekt ( journal), 123, 124, 129, 133 Bechtel Corporation, 230
Armenians, 121 Becket, Welton, 240
Arts and Crafts Movement, 46 Bedouins, 39
Ashbee, C. R. (Charles Robert), 46, 48, Behrenson, Bernard, 43
52, 52, 53 Behrenson, Mary, 43
Assyrian motifs, 86 Beilin, Yossi, 207
Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal, 5, 15, 116 Beirut, Lebanon, 30, 225, 227, 264;
Athens, Greece, 39, 44, 109 American University in, 229; Center
At Taiyiba, Israel, 188 for Lebanese Handicrafts, 229;
At-Tamam, Abd, 190, 191, 197, 207 Defense Ministry (1965), 226, 228;
automobiles, 21, 85, 88, 89, 105, 163, 169, Ministry of Telecommunication,
179, 202, 230, 232 226; 1943 master plan, 226; Phoenicia
Avesta, Sweden, 87 Inter-Continental (1954), 229; Solid-
Awni, Kahtan, 101 ere, 230; souks, 230; Technical Bureau,
Azerbaijan, 30n.3 228
Ben Gurion (or Ben-Gurion), David,
Baalbek (Lebanon) Hellenistic ruins, 140, 142, 152, 155, 197; and Labour
230 Party, 150
Baath Party, 109, 111 Berbers, 63, 71, 258
Babylon, 8, 86, 157 Berkes, Niyazi, 119
Baghdad, Iraq, 7, 28, 29, 81–96, 97–100, Berlin, Germany, 8, 32n.12; Charlotten-
101, 101–15, 125; American Embassy burg Technische Hochschule in, 13
in, 21, 221; bridges, 84, 85, 98; gossip Berman, Marshall, 264
squares, 106, 107, 107, 108; housing Bethlehem, Israel, 45
projects, 98, 103, 110; Master Plan Bey, Kemallettin, 13
(1958), 103; and Ministry of Foreign Bey, Osman Hamdi, 13
Affairs (1967), 91; and Monument for Bey, Vedat, 13
the Unknown Soldier, 91–92; New Bhabha, Homi, 62
Towns, 103, 105, 149; 1960s building Bigger, Gideon, 47
boom, 109; Ottoman Palace (1861), Birsel, Melih, 123, 130
Serai, 81; slums, 85, 107; souk, 102, Bishara, Azmi, 186
108; and Western Baghdad Develop- Bonatz, Paul, 122
ment Scheme, 103, 104, 105 Bozdovan, Sibel, 18, 20, 29, 116– 38, 182,
Baghdad Modern Art Group, 85 289–90

294 Index
Brasilia, Brazil, 99
Brazil, 229, 244
Breuer, Marcel, 123
Buddha statues in Bamian, 262
Bunshaft, Gordon, 121, 130
Bury St. Edmunds, 42
Cairo, Egypt, 7, 9, 13, 30, 43, 236, 260,
264; and Arab Bureau of Architects,
Planners, and Technical Consultants,
225; and Arab League headquarters
(1958–60), 238, 240; Bulaq, 241; City
of the Dead, 253n.66; and Comité
pour la Conservation des Monuments
Arabes, 43; Coptic Museum, 44; Helio-
polis, 237; Helwan urgent housing
project, 239; Imb1bah “Workers’
City,” 240; Madinar al-Awqaf (Engi-
neers’ City), 240; Masaakin el-
Qadima (urgent housing), 240; Midan
Tahrir, 239; Mosque-Madrasa of Amir
Khayrbak, 241; Mugamma, 239; Nasr
City (Madinet Nasr, Victory City),
240; National Theatre and City of the
Arts, 240; Nile Hilton (1953–59), 238,
240; Old Cairo (Fustat, founded 641),
241, 242; Radio and Television Center
in, 239; School of Architecture in,
208; Zamalek, 237
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 21, 87
Cambridge University, Charterhouse
and Pembroke College, 42
Canada, 143
Cansever, Turgut, 124
Carnegie, Mrs. Andrew (Louise), 48
Casablanca, Morocco, 226
Caudill, Rowlett & Scott (CRS), 232
Cegizkan, Ali, 133
Celebration, Florida, 54
Chadirji, Rifat, 23, 86, 91, 101, 109; and
Tobacco Monopoly offices (1966), 92
Chandigarh, India, 99
Church, Frederick Edwin, 41
climate, 18, 21, 22, 68, 69, 70– 72, 87, 88,
108, 125, 128, 221, 226, 230, 239,
258–59
coffee houses, 103
Cohen, Abner, 190, 196
Cold War, 108, 116, 118, 119, 239
Colonial Williamsburg (Virginia), 54
Committee for the Conservation of
Monuments of Arab Art, 9
Congrès International d’Architecture
Moderne (CIAM), 226
Coste, Pascale, 7, 8
Creswell, Keppel A. C., 10, 11, 32n.11
Crimea, 30n.3
“Cromer System,” 47
Ctesiphon, 14, 92
cultural memory, 30
culture of fear, 190, 193
Dahan, Gabriel, 194, 195
Dalokay, Vedat, 36n.47; and Kocatepe
Mosque in Ankara (1957), 127
Dammon, Saudi Arabia, 231
Dannat, Trevor, 232
Darwish, Mahmud, 202, 203, 204, 206
Datsun, 234
Dayr Yasin, 201
Decemviri, 43
decolonization, 23
democracy, 128– 33, 163, 171, 173, 264
Derviî, Rıza, 122
Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, 231– 32; airport
at, 233
Di Fausto, Florentano, 61, 72, 73, 74;
‘Ain el-Fras Hotel design, Ghadames
(1935), 73, 74, 75; Tripoli madrasa
proposal, 73
Difesa della Razza ( journal), 74
disposable architecture, 142
Diyala River (Iraq), 100
Dogon huts (Mali), 223
Doha, Qatar, 264
Doxiades, Constantinos, 17, 28, 97–102,
105–6, 108–11, 110, 226, 231
Doxiadis Associates, 98–111
Index 295
Dubai, Saudi Arabia, 264 Florence, Italy, 74
dynapolis, 99, 106, 107 Forughi, Mohsen, 14
France, 154, 226
Echochard, Michel, 226 Fu’ad (King), 10
eclecticism, 14, 28, 73 Fulbright grants, 123
Edinburgh, Scotland, 52 Fuller, R. Buckminster, 161, 164, 167
Egli, Ernst, 15, 34n.32
Egypt, 5, 9, 10, 13, 14, 22–23, 31, 40, Gabr, Ali Labib, 260
48, 97, 208, 236– 37, 243, 256, 258– “Garden of Eden” theme park, Bagh-
60; Infitah policy, 223, 240; Socialist dad, 88, 89
architecture in, 259 Garnier, Tony, and Cité Industrielle,
Ekistics, 99, 106, 107 102
El-Khoury, Pierre, 228 Geddes, Patrick, 51–52
El-Wakil, Abdelwahed, 234 George V (King of England), 48
Eldem, Sedad Hakkı, 16, 20, 29, 119, 121, Gérôme, Jean-Léon, 13
122, 125, 127, 133 Ghadames: Hotel ‘Ain el-Fras, 75; Oasis,
Elon, Amos, 169 73; Piazza of the Large Mulberry, 73
Emlak Bank, 128 Gibberd, Frederick, 130
Erol, Nevzat, and Istanbul City Hall Giovannoni, Gustavo, 64
(1953), 127 globalization, 135, 136, 221–54 passim,
Ersin, Neja, apartment block (Ankara), 255–66
134 Godard, André, 10, 14
Eshkol, Levi, 140, 142, 143 Goldhagen, Sarah, 120
Ethiopia, 71 Gorst, Sir Eldon, 43
European Union, 6, 136n.6 Greece, 244
Exhibition of Rationalist Architecture green space, 51, 88–89, 102, 103, 106,
(1928), 69 152, 160n.19, 178, 179, 207
Gropius, Walter, 82, 92, 125; and civic
Faluja, Iraq, 188 center plan (Talahassee, Florida), 88;
Farouk (King), 237 and University of Baghdad campus,
Farsi, Sheik Mohammed Said, 234 87, 90, 101, 221, 222, 222
Fathy, Hassan, 22, 91, 107, 234, 237, Gutbrod, Rolf, 232
259–60
Faysal (or Faisal) (King of Saudia Hadad, Michael, 200
Arabia) 83, 84, 231– 32 Haifa, Israel, 206
Faysal II (King), 89 Hajj Terminal, 232, 236
Ferguson, James, 11 Hall, Stuart, 136
Ferrara, Italy, 55 Halprin, Lawrence, 164
Finland, 143 Hamdi, Osman, 9
Finley, John H., 42, 52 Hamid, Abdul (Sultan), 51
Finsbury, England, 10 Hanci, Abdurrahman, 124
Firdawsi’s grave, 10 Hanna, Hanna Abu, 202, 203, 205, 206
Fletcher, Bannister, The Tree of Architec- Hashimshoni, Avia, 168
ture (1896), 11, 12 Hashimshoni, Zion, 168

296 Index
Hassan, Faiq, 85
Haussmann, Georges E. Baron, 173
Hegel, Georg W. F., 55
Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum (HOK),
232
Herzfeld, Ernst, 8, 10
Herzl, Theodor, 153, 154, 155
Hijazi, Ibrahim, 206
Hindieh, Maurice, 226
historical justice, 187
historic preservation, 10, 45–48, 51, 53,
54, 62, 74, 91, 161, 163, 168, 171, 179,
222–26, 234, 242, 262
Hittites, 34n.33
Hobsbawm, Eric, 31
Houston, Texas, 240
Howe, Fisher, 50
Hunt, Mrs. Holman, 48
Husayn, Faysal ibn (King), 81, 83, 84,
90, 93
Hussein, Saddam, 83, 115n.39
Hussein, Sherif (King), 43
Ibrahim, Saad, 240
Idumea, 40
immigration, 6, 29, 139–40, 141, 142–60
Imperial Ottoman Bank, 48
India, 7, 24
International Bank for Reconstruction
and Development, 98
International modernism, 3, 16, 17, 30,
91, 116–19, 121–28, 133– 36, 161, 167,
169– 71, 174, 221–25, 228, 229, 237,
239, 242–44, 256, 259, 263; and devel-
opmental modernism, 163, 169, 178,
180, 181; and functionalist modern-
ism, 168, 226; and “Ornamented Mod-
ern,” 2; and situated modernism, 163,
169, 180
Iran, 5, 6, 9, 10, 13, 14, 24, 261
Iran Society for National Heritage, 9
Iraq, 5, 7, 14, 21, 22, 24, 27, 81–96, 257,
259; British occupation of, 5, 82, 100;
and Department of Antiquities, 86;
and Hashemite monarchy, 81, 83, 90,
97, 100, 109
Iraq Consult, 23
Iraq Development Board (IDB), 22, 28,
29, 84, 86–88, 90, 93, 97–100
Iraqi Petroleum Company (IPC), 82, 84
Iraq war, vii, 93, 257; and reconstruc-
tion, 111 ; and sectarian divisions, 106 ;
and tribal divisions, 106, 107
Irving & Jones, 229
Isa, Fathi Uthman, 203
Isaiah (biblical prophet), 173
Islamabad, Pakistan, and Mosque of
Shah Faisal, 36n.47
Islamic revival, 6
Israel, 6, 27, 29, 106, 139–60 passim,
161–85 passim, 186–217 passim, 223,
225, 240, 261; American influence,
164; Beit Yosef settlement, 156; Bet
Lid prison, 202; border police, 194,
195; Histadrut labor union, 150;
Housing Ministry, 149, 152; Islamic
Movement of Israel, 211; and Israel
Defense Force, 187; Jewish Agency’s
Settlement Department, 140, 145;
Knesset (Israeli Parliament), 140,
152, 199; Lifta, 162; Little Triangle,
188, 189, 189, 190; military laws, 202;
Million Plan, 155; New Town pro-
gram, 148, 149, 150, 152; and 1956
Sinai Campaign, 187; and 1967 War,
161, 174, 239; Planning Department,
148; Public Committee, 195, 196;
Rashish Committee, 198; Salo Hersh-
man, Gilo, 162; Shekem, Israeli army
caterers, 198; Shikum Ovdim (Work-
ers’ Housing), 150; transit towns
(ma’abaras), 139–60
Istanbul, Turkey, 5, 6, 8, 116; airport,
128; Anadolu Club Building on
Büyükada, Prince Island, 124, 125;
Ataköy Cooperative Development,
128, 131; Bosporus, 119; Çınar Hotel,
128; City Hall (1953), 127, 128, 129;
Index 297
Istanbul, Turkey (continued)
Fine Arts Academy, 13; Florya motel
and beach facilities, 121; Hilton Hotel
(1955), 20, 24, 29, 119–23, 120, 124, 125–
28, 126, 130, 134, 136; Hyatt Regency
Hotel, 135, 136; Imperial Ottoman
Museum, 9; Lawyers’ Cooperative
apartments, Mecidiyeköy, 130, 131;
suburb of Yeîilköy, 130, 132; Suley-
maniyye Mosque complex, 9; Villa
on Büyükada, Prince Island, 122
Istfahan (Isfahan), Iran, 236
Italian colonialism, 61– 78; and Fascist
imperial politics, 74
Jacobs, Jane, 223
Jaffa, Israel, 44
Jaljulya, Israel, 190, 191, 197
Jameson, Frederic, 118
Jansen, Hermann, 15
Japan, 143, 225
Jawdat, Ellen, 21
Jawdat, Nizar Ali, 21, 87
Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, 43, 231, 232, 234
Jerusalem, Israel, 27, 28, 29, 39, 40,
41–60, 161–66, 166, 167– 74, 175, 176–
85; 1968 Jerusalem Masterplan, 164,
165, 168– 71, 169, 172, 176, 180, 181; Al-
Haram al-Sharif, 39; Anglo-Egyptian
Bank, 48; Armenian Convent, 46;
Central Boulevard design, 172, 173;
ceramic street sign, 49, 50; Church
of Calvary, 40; Church of the Holy
Sepulchre, 39, 40, 42; Citadel, 51;
clock tower, 46, 51, 52; Damascus
Gate, 44, 51, 178; Dome of the Rock,
39, 48, 49, 56; Gethsemane, 54; Hass
promenade, 179; Hebrew Union Col-
lege campus, 179; Herod’s Gate, 51;
Inner Loop design, 171; Jaffa Gate,
51–52, 52, 53; Jerusalem Committee,
161, 163–69, 173, 174, 176–81; Mamluk
fountains, 39; Mammila complex, 179;
Mt. Herzl, 173; Mt. Scopus, 172– 73;
298 Index
Mount of Olives, 39, 44; Municipal
Ecology Section, 178; Quarries of
Solomon, 44; St. Stephen’s Gate, 51;
Sherover promenade, 179; Solomon’s
Temple, 54, 56; Subcommittee for
Town Planning, 164; Tyropean Valley,
51; Walls of Süleyman the Magnifi-
cent, 39, 41, 46, 51, 54, 55; Western
Wall, 173; Yad Vashem Museum to
Holocaust Victims, 187
Jerusalem Post, 165
Jewish Colonization Society of Vienna, 45
Jewish National Fund, 45
Johnson, Philip, 164
Johnson Institute (Sweden), 87
Jordan, 161, 173, 188, 189; Amman, 173
Jubran, Salim, 202
Judea, Israel, 44, 45
Kacel, Ela, 130
Kaempfer, Engelbert, 7
Kafr Qasim, Israel, 186–217 passim;
and 1956 massacre at, 29, 187, 193, 206,
207, 211, 212; archives, 207; cemetery,
191, 192, 199, 200, 204; community
center, 207–8, 209, 210, 211; monu-
ments, 201, 202, 206– 7, 208; museum,
207, 212
Kahn, Louis, 145, 147, 161, 164, 167, 169,
170, 171, 176, 178
Kaiser Wilhelm II, 32n.12, 46, 51
Karim, Sayed (or Sayyid), 231, 232, 237
Karkur, Israel, 151
Karradah, Iraq, 100
Katsav, Moshe, 207
Kerry, John, 92
Keun & Loeb, Messrs. See Kühn, Loeb
& Co.
Keynbes, J. M., 43
Khairallah, Samir, 228, 229
Khalifeh, Marcel, 203
Khan, Fazlur, 232, 236
Khan, Riza (also Pahlavi, Riza Shah), 5,
9, 10, 11
Khayat, Shlomo, 208, 211
Khomeini, Ahmad, 25
Khomeini, Ayatollah, 24; tomb of, 24, 25
Kiev, Ukraine, 48
King Faisal University (Damman), 232
King Saud University (near Riyadh),
232, 233
Kirkuk, Iraq, housing projects, 98
Kitchener, Lord Horatio, 43
Kollek, Teddy, 161, 163–69, 167, 177, 178,
179, 180–81
Korean War, 116, 119
Kortan, Enis, 123
Kufic calligraphy, 91
Kühn, Loeb & Co. (Abraham Kühn
and Solomon Loeb), 48
Kurdani, Israel, 151
Kutcher, Arthur, 165
Kuwait, 5
labor therapy, 153, 154
Lamartine, Alphonse de, 39
Larco, Sebastiano, 69
Lasdun, Denys, 171
Lavon, Pinhas, 140
Lawrence, T. E. (Thomas Edward;
“Lawrence of Arabia”), 43
Lebanon, 5, 223, 225–26, 243; and
Department of Antiquities, 230;
French Mandate period, 225–26,
230; and Ministry of Tourism, 230
Le Corbusier, 87, 90, 101, 124, 130,
226
Legault, Rejean, 120
Leon, Edwin de, 41
Leptis Magna (Libya): Hotel at the Exca-
vations of, 69, 70, 70, 74 ; Oasis of Al-
Khums, 70
Lerner, Daniel, 117, 118, 133
Levant, 121, 229
Lever House (New York), 124
Lewis, Bernard, 117, 177
Libya, 27, 28, 31, 61– 78; Jabal Nafusah
region, 74, 75; Office of Indigenous
Applied Arts, 62; Troglodyte houses,
74
Limongelli, Alessandro, 66
Lindstroem, Sune, 232
local materials, 21, 45, 108, 125
London, England, 8, 10, 40, 95n.20, 264
Los Angeles, California, 240
Luxor, Egypt, 237, 259
ma’abara, 142–43, 145, 149, 150–55, 157,
158
Macfarlane, P. W., 98, 111n.4
Maclean, Sir William, 46
Makiya, Kanan, 92
Makiya, Muhammad, 86, 101, 109; and
1963 Khulafa Mosque, 90; and 1965
Mosul Museum of Antiquities, 91;
and 1967 Baghdad Ministry of Foreign
Affairs, 91
Malinki, Shmuel, 194, 195, 197
Mamluk period, 13, 260
Manchester, England, 48
Marefat, Mina, 88
Marshall Plan, 5, 98, 118, 119
martyrs, 191, 206, 207
Masa’ud, Ali al-Maligi, 240
Mashrabiyya, 125
Masri, Aziz el, 43
Mata, Arturo Soria y, 102
McDonald & Yakeley, 232
McLaren, Brian, 28, 61– 78, 290
McMahon, Sir Henry, 43
McMillen, Louis, 87
Mecca, 5, 231, 232, 234
Medieval revivals, 13, 33– 34n.28, 49, 86,
88, 89, 91, 242, 243, 259, 265
Medieval sites, 100, 240, 241
Medina, 5, 232
memorial rituals, 187, 188, 191, 193, 194,
196, 198, 200, 202, 204, 205, 212
memorialization, 30, 188, 193, 199, 203,
206, 207, 212
Menderes, Adnan, 127
Mesopotamian heritage, 82, 83, 89, 157
Index 299
Middle East, map of, 2
Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, Farns-
worth House, 123
Milner, Lord Alfred, 48
Minoprio & Spencely, 98
Mitchell, Timothy, 222, 223, 261
Mitchell, W. J. T., 174, 179
Moemem, Galal, 239
Mond, Sir Alfred, 48
Moneo, Rafael, 230
Money, Sir Arthur, 46
Monk, Daniel, 56, 174
monuments, 3, 8–10, 188, 190, 194–96,
200, 201, 206, 211, 212, 225, 236; pro-
posed for Deir Yassin massacre, 187;
Holocaust memorials and, 187; Land
Day massacre, 186
Morocco, 31, 62, 63, 223, 229, 244
Morris, Benny, 188, 190
Morris, William, 46
Mosul, Iraq, 91, 98
Moustapha, Ahmed Farid, 232
Mshatta Palace façade, 8, 9, 32n.12
Mughal India, 236
Mumford, Lewis, 161, 164, 173
Munich (Germany) Exhibition of
Islamic Art (1910), 8
Munir, Hisham, 86
Museum of Arab Art (Cairo), 9
Museum of Islamic Art (Istanbul), 9
Mussayib, Iraq, housing projects, 98
Nakhleh, Yusuf, 200
Napoleon, Bonaparte, 7, 30n.3, 154
Nasiriyyah, Saudi Arabia, 230
Nasser, Ali, 259
Nasser, Colonel Gamal Abdel, 97, 225,
237, 239, 240, 242, 258
national identity, 13–17, 260–62
nationalism, 8, 11, 23, 24, 27, 28, 31n.6,
31n.10, 32n.13, 36n.48, 82, 83, 91, 98,
100, 109, 117–22 passim, 136, 139, 148,
152, 153, 158, 163, 170, 176, 177, 179,
193, 212, 237, 255, 257, 258, 264
300 Index
Nazareth, Israel, 202; Mary’s Well plaza
in, 200
Neema, Pierre, 229
Nervi, Pier Luigi, 127
Neutra, Richard, 122
New Gourna, Egypt, 23, 224, 237, 259,
260
New York, NY, 26, 32n.12
New York Globe, 53
New York Times, 107
Niemeyer, Oscar, 127, 229
Noguchi, Isamu, 164
Nooradin, Hoshia, 86
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO), 118, 137n.6
Northcliffe, Lord Alfred, 41, 48
Nouvel, Jean, 26
Nubia, 40, 258
Ofer, Shalom, 195
oil, 5, 31, 47, 82, 84, 97, 225; and OPEC ,
223, 231, 232
Olearius, Adam, 7
Omar, Ramzy, 259
Onat, Emin, 122
Orientalism (or Orientalist), 3, 6–8, 29,
30n.1, 32n.13, 35n.43, 89, 107, 108, 125,
133, 163, 171, 173– 74, 177– 78, 180, 198,
221, 223, 225, 236, 262
Otto, Frei, 232
Ottoman architecture, 13, 125, 127, 174
Ottoman period, 4, 5, 7, 13, 81, 82, 84,
100, 117, 236
Oxford University (England), 47
Paestum, Italy, 40
Pahlavi, Riza Shah. See Khan, Riza
Pahlavi dynasty, 10, 32n.16
Palestine, 29, 30, 47, 140, 153, 154, 155,
174, 176, 186–217 passim, 223; amd
Mandate Palestine, 5, 6, 27, 56, 173–
74; American Red Cross in, 42
Pan-Arab nation, 82, 83, 225, 237
Paris, France, 86, 226, 264; and École des
 Beaux-Arts, 13, 14, 208; and Institut
du Monde Arabe (1988), 26
Pasargade, Iran, Achaemenid palace in,
31n.11
Pellegrini, Giovanni, 71, 72
Perkins, G. Holmes, 123
Persia, Iran, 88, 89, 92
Pevsner, Nikolaus, 164
Pharaonic period in Egypt, 7, 8, 237,
240, 260
photographic aesthetic, 68
Piacentini, Marcello, 64
Piccinato, Luigi, 128
Pierpont Morgan, John Pierpont and
John Pierpont Jr., 48
pilgrimage, 25, 28, 41, 42, 52, 55, 178
poetry, 170, 176, 187; Iraqi, 86, 89,
95n.17; Palestinian, 199, 200, 201–
6, 212, 213n.5
Polish soldier-artists, 85
Ponti, Gio, 87
Pope, Arthur Upham, 10, 11
populist architecture, 25, 26, 31n.10
postcolonial identity, 4, 27, 31, 81, 98, 111,
120, 133, 170, 223, 237, 255, 256, 257,
259, 261, 263, 264
prefabricated architecture, 143, 144, 145,
154, 230, 232
Progressive Architecture ( journal), 17
Pro-Jerusalem Society, 46, 48, 51, 53, 56
Pro-Palestine Society, 48
Rava, Carlo Enrico, 61, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70,
71, 72, 74
Rava, Maurizio, 66, 67
Ravenna, Italy, 55
Rhodes, 73
Riad, Mahmoud, 240
Ricard, Prosper, 63
Richmond, Ernest, 46, 48
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, 30, 231; Paolo
Ghera’s Central Market, 232; confer-
ence center, 232; King Faisal Founda-
tion, 232; Masmak Castle, 236; Qasr
el-Hokm palace and government dis-
trict, 230, 235, 236; WAISIA, 232
Riyadh University, 232
Robert Matthew Johnson Marshall and
Partners (RMJM), 232, 234
Roberts, David, 40
Romanelli, Pietro, 65, 67
Roman influence, 11, 63, 65, 67, 68, 70,
221
Rome, Italy, 40, 44, 86. See also Exhi-
bition of Rationalist Architecture
(1928)
Rosh ha-Ayin, Israel, 195
Rostow, W. W., 222
Roth, Alfred, 226
Ruppin, Arthur, 45
Rusafa, Iraq, 84, 100
Russia, Czarist rule in, 97
Russian constructivism, 68

Qajar period, 5, 10, 13, 33n.27 Saarinen, Eero, 123

Qalansuwa, Israel, 188 Sadat, Anwar, 223, 240, 242
Qaqun, Israel, 188 Safide, Moshe, 164
Qasem, General Abd al-Karim, 90 Said, Edward, 30n.1, 177, 178, 180, 185n.48,
Qasr al-Hajj mosque (Libya), 68 245n.6
Qassim, Abdul Karim, 24 St. Petersburg, Russia, 264
Qawar, Jamal, 200 Salim, Jewad, 85, 86
Salter, Lord Arthur, 22
Rabegh, 43 Samarra, Iraq, 7, 92
racist discourse, 61, 71, 74, 76, 243 Samuel, Herbert, 47–48
Ramleh, Israel, 195 San Juan, Puerto Rico: Caribe Hilton
Ranger, Terrence, 31 Hotel, 124; La Concha Hotel, 127

Index 301
Sarre, Friedrich, 8 Süleyman the Magnificent, 39
Sarsur, Fatimah Salih, 195 Sumerian forms, 86
Sarsur, Hamdelelullah, 198 Susa, Iran, 31n.10
Sarsur, Ibrahim, 197, 198, 199, 207, 211, Sweden, 143
212 Syria, 5, 7, 40, 48, 226
Sasanian period, 10, 13, 14, 92
Saud, Abdul Aziz al (“Ibn Saud”), 230, Tabet, Antoine, 226
232 Taliesen West (Phoenix, AZ), 89
Saudi Arabia, 5, 223, 230– 36, 243 Tallin, Estonia, 87
Scarin, Emilio, 74 Tange, Kenzo, 232
Schumpter, Joseph, 225 teahouses, 105
Schweid, Yoseph, 168, 176 Team X (Ten), 170
Sert, Josep Lluis (or José Luis), 21, Technion City, Israel, 168
95n.24, 125, 221, 222 Tehran, Iran, 6, 7, 25; Academy of Arts
Seville, Spain, 236 and Sciences, 33n.25; Iran Bastan
Shadmi, Issachar, 194 Museum, 14, 15; Iranian Senate Build-
Shalom, Mordechai Ish, 168 ing, 14; museum in, 34n.29; tomb of
Sharett, Moshe, 188 Ayatollah Khomeini, 24, 25, 36n.47
Shebib, Naoum, 239 Tehrani, Mohammad, 25
Shehab, Fuad (president of Lebanon), Tehran University, Faculty of Technol-
229 ogy, 14, 16
Shi≤as, 106, 114n.38 Tel Aviv (or Tel-Aviv), Israel, 148
Shibab, Fuad, 225 Tel Yeruham, Israel, 151
Shiber, Saba George, 228 Tennyson, Charles, 43
Shihab government, 230 Texier, Charles, 7
Sikh Regiment, 51st, 48 Thebes, Egypt, 55
Siloah, Israel, 52 Tigris River, 84, 87, 100, 102
Siroux, Maxime, 14 Tira, Israel, 151, 188
Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM), Titus (Roman emperor), 54
20, 119, 121, 123, 124, 130, 232, 236 Tod, General James, 7
Solomon (King), 44 Tokay, Enver, 124
Stein, Joseph, 125 Torro, Ferrer, and Torregrosa: Caribe
Stoddard, John, 41 Hilton Hotel, San Juan (Puerto Rico),
Stone, Edward Durrell, 125, 229 124; La Concha Hotel, 127
Storrs, Rev. John, 42 tourism, 4, 8, 28, 41, 48, 51–52, 54, 63,
Storrs, Ronald, 42, 43, 44–45, 46, 51, 53, 68, 70, 73, 125, 127, 207, 223, 228, 230,
54, 55, 56 240–41
Strachey, Lytton, 43 Tripoli, Libya, 65, 66, 71; ancient castle,
social engineering, 106 62, 66; Corso Vittorio Emanuele III
Soviet Linear Cities (1930s), 102 display, 63, 64; house photographed
Soviet Union, 6, 119, 240 by Giovanni Pellegrini, 72; Inter-
Sudan, 257 national and Permanent Fair, 229;
Suez Canal, 5, 237, 239 Madrasa proposal for, 73; Oasis, 66,

302 Index
 68, 69; Piazza Italia, 66, 67; Qaramanli
house, 65, 65; walls of, 62, 66
Tripolitania, 63
Tubi, Tawfiq, 199, 200
Tunisia, 62, 63
Turkey, 4, 5, 6, 15, 24; Americanization
of, 29, 116– 38 passim; Chamber of
Architects, 123; Democrat Party (DP),
116–20, 122, 127, 134, 135; Kemalist
revolution, 118; Ministry of Educa-
tion, 122; Ministry of Transportation,
122; Republican Peoples’ Party (RPP),
116; Turkish Pension Funds, 119
Tyrwhitt, Jaqueline, 113n.25
Ukhadir, Palace, 92
Ummayad period, 7
UNESCO, and plan for medieval Cairo,
242
United Kingdom, 81
United Nations, 18, 129, 188; Blueprint
for Peace (1951), 18, 19; UNDP, 231;
Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA),
190; Secretariat Building, 18, 119
United States, 6, 11, 24, 116– 38, 143, 188,
240, 243; and CIA, 239; Economic
Cooperation Administration, 119; as
empire, 264; Information Services
agency (USIS), Istanbul, 129; oil-
related investments in the Middle
East, 225; Operations Mission, 226;
navy, 230; Pax Americana, 223; State
Department, 23, 230
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
(1948), 18
universal humanity, 18
University of Florence, 74
University of Pennsylvania, 123
University of Southern California, 95n.20
Upper-Yokneam, Israel, 142
urban planning and urbanism, 4, 82,
88–89, 97–115 passim, 122, 163, 165,
167, 168, 170, 171, 178–81, 222, 223,
225, 236, 240, 256–60, 262–64
Van Eyck, Aldo, 170
Venice, Italy, 55
vernacular architecture, 22, 55, 70, 72,
83, 91, 92, 134, 136, 171, 221, 223,
234– 37, 240, 243, 256, 260
vernacular motifs, 23, 229, 234, 260
Vienna, Austria, 8
Volpi, Giuseppe, 62, 63, 65, 66
Wadi ‘Ara, Israel, 188
Wahabi fundamentalism, 231
Waziriyah (Iraq), 100
Welfare Party (Refa Partesi) (Turkey),
25
Wogenscky, André, 226
World War I, 5, 10, 24, 32n.11, 41, 43, 53,
81, 84
World War II, 17, 18, 20, 23–24, 84, 85,
103, 116–17, 120, 124, 133, 161, 163, 170,
221, 223, 225, 230, 236, 242, 258
Wright, Frank Lloyd, 82, 87, 90, 92, 93,
111; Baghdad Theater and Opera
house, 88, 89, 101; German publica-
tion of Illinois prairie houses, 17; plan
for Baghdad, 88, 89; plan for Baghdad
art gallery, 88–89, 93
Yamasaki, Minoru, 123, 231
Yokneam, Israel, 142, 143, 143, 144, 144,
146, 150, 151, 152
Young, James, 187
Zaharoff, Sir Basil, 48
Zayyad, Tawfiq, 200, 202
Zevi, Bruno, 161, 164, 172, 176
Zionism, 45, 139, 148, 152–55, 157, 158,
163, 165, 168, 174, 176
Zionist Commission, 48
Zubaida, Sami, 81
Index 303